The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until
now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists,
writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of
high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between
1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.
After risking the hazardous journey across the Atlantic,
these Americans embarked on a greater journey in the City of
Light. Most had never left home, never experienced a
different culture. None had any guarantee of success. That
they achieved so much for themselves and their country
profoundly altered American history. As David McCullough
writes, “Not all pioneers went west.” Elizabeth Blackwell,
the first female doctor in America, was one of this intrepid
band. Another was Charles Sumner, who enrolled at the
Sorbonne because of a burning desire to know more about
everything. There he saw black students with the same
ambition he had, and when he returned home, he would become
the most powerful, unyielding voice for abolition in the
U.S. Senate, almost at the cost of his life.
Two staunch friends, James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B.
Morse, worked unrelentingly every day in Paris, Cooper
writing and Morse painting what would be his masterpiece.
From something he saw in France, Morse would also bring home
his momentous idea for the telegraph.
Pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans launched
his spectacular career performing in Paris at age 15. George
P. A. Healy, who had almost no money and little education,
took the gamble of a lifetime and with no prospects
whatsoever in Paris became one of the most celebrated
portrait painters of the day. His subjects included Abraham
Lincoln.
Medical student Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote home of his toil
and the exhilaration in “being at the center of things” in
what was then the medical capital of the world. From all
they learned in Paris, Holmes and his fellow “medicals” were
to exert lasting influence on the profession of medicine in
the United States.
Writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark
Twain, and Henry James were all “discovering” Paris,
marveling at the treasures in the Louvre, or out with the
Sunday throngs strolling the city’s boulevards and gardens.
“At last I have come into a dreamland,” wrote Harriet
Beecher Stowe, seeking escape from the notoriety Uncle Tom’s
Cabin had brought her. Almost forgotten today, the heroic
American ambassador Elihu Washburne bravely remained at his
post through the Franco-Prussian War, the long Siege of
Paris and even more atrocious nightmare of the Commune. His
vivid account in his diary of the starvation and suffering
endured by the people of Paris (drawn on here for the first
time) is one readers will never forget. The genius of
sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the son of an immigrant
shoemaker, and of painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer
Sargent, three of the greatest American artists ever, would
flourish in Paris, inspired by the examples of brilliant
French masters, and by Paris itself.
Nearly all of these Americans, whatever their troubles
learning French, their spells of homesickness, and their
suffering in the raw cold winters by the Seine, spent many
of the happiest days and nights of their lives in Paris.
McCullough tells this sweeping, fascinating story with power
and intimacy, bringing us into the lives of remarkable men
and women who, in Saint-Gaudens’s phrase, longed “to soar
into the blue.” The Greater Journey is itself a masterpiece.
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