A year in Paris .
For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activis.
Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence.
Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence--to be grappled with, explored, and transcended--the rest of her life.
Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration--to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem too French.
For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there.
Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program--in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford.
Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family.
Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn\'t have been more different.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer.
Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women. since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision--and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. . .
A year in Paris
