Paris at the start of the 20th century was the center of transatlantic literary exchange. From Hemingway, to Stein, to Baldwin, the city represented a refuge for American voices seeking a welcoming home to literary exploration.
Who introduced the great American authors to French readers between the wars? Who worked to disseminate French literature in the United States? Essential brokers to this phenomenon were William and Jenny Bradley, who founded the first literary agency in France and worked for Clemenceau, Cendrars, Colette, Gide, Malraux, Sartre and Camus, as well as Dreiser, Hemingway, Faulkner, Stein, Dos Passos, Chandler, and Baldwin. The Bradleys were treasured members of the American Library in Paris community: members, donors, and contributors to Ex-Libris. One hundred years later, we are delighted to re-introduce the Bradleys to the American Library, and celebrate their essential role in the construction of the transatlantic Parisian literary landscape.
Spanning literary salons of the Île Saint-Louis and the holiday resorts of the Côte d’Azur, and drawing on previously unpublished archives, Laurence Cossu-Beaumont’s William et Jenny Bradley invites us to discover the untold story of this Franco-American couple, and sheds new light on literary history from the 1920s to the immediate post-war period.
About the speakers:
Laurence Cossu-Beaumont is Professor of American Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research focuses on African American Studies and Book History with a special interest for transatlantic cultural exchanges in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Her latest book, Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain: William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques, was published by ENS Editions in 2023.
