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 homeness, 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.