Rather than provide pages and pages of annotated biographies, I have simply provided below the titles of books representing a wide range of people, and I hope that you will be interested to know more about one or two of them. This list, by no means comprehensive, includes Parisian or French men and women as well as expatriates of several nationalities for whom Paris was a part of their lives.
Albert Camus: A Biography, Herbert Lottman (Doubleday, 1979).
Colette
Creating Colette, Volume I: From Ingénue to Libertine, 1873–1913 (1998) and Volume II: From Baroness to Woman of Letters, 1912–1954 (1999), both by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier and published by Steerforth.
Colette: Earthly Paradise: An Autobiography Drawn from Her Lifetime Writings (1966) and Belles Saisons: A Colette Scrapbook (1978), both by Robert Phelps and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s third husband, whom she unsuccessfully hid from the Nazis but successfully managed to free from deportation to Auschwitz, wrote two of his own books about life with Colette: The Delights of Growing Old: An Uncommon Biography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) and Close to Colette: Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957; Greenwood, 1973).
Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story, Amanda Vaill (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) and Living Well Is the Best Revenge, Calvin Tomkins (Viking, 1971; Modern Library, 1998). Tender Is the Night is one of my favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. When I first read it, I knew it was loosely based on the dazzling American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy, but I had no clue how much of it was fiction, and I have remained fascinated by the Murphys. With the publication of these two books, fact and fiction have been sorted out. Of the two, Calvin Tomkins, longtime art critic for the New Yorker, writes the smaller but not in any way lesser book. Living Well relates the Murphys’ story concisely and engagingly, accompanied by black-and-white reproductions of Gerald’s paintings and sixty-nine photographs from the Murphys’ family album. Amanda Vaill’s heftier Everybody Was So Young includes two inserts of black-and-white photos and some more recent material than the older Tomkins title, which focuses on the years before they returned to America in 1933. The Murphys were more legendary on the Côte d’Azur, where they lived in the Villa America on the Cap d’Antibes, but they held court in Paris just as eloquently.
The Italics Are Mine, Nina Berberova (Harcourt, Brace, 1969; Knopf, 1992, revised translation). Memoir of Russian writer and exile to Paris and the United States. Berberova, who passed away in 1993, is also the subject of “Going On,” an essay in Kennedy Fraser’s wonderful book Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women’s Lives from Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer (Knopf, 1996).
The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill (Atheneum, 1963).
Madame de Sévigné: A Life and Letters, Frances Mossiker (Knopf, 1983).
Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman, Francine du Plessix Gray (Atlas, 2008).
Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat, Beth Archer Brombert (Little, Brown, 1996).
M. F. K. Fisher and Me: A Memoir of Food and Friendship, Jeannette Ferrary (St. Martin’s, 1991; Thomas Dunne, 1998).
Matisse and Picasso, Yve-Alain Bois (Flammarion, 1999).
Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art, Françoise Gilot (Doubleday, 1990).
Matisse, Picasso, Miró: As I Knew Them, Rosamond Bernier (Knopf, 1991).
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869–1908 (1998) and Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Color, 1909–1954 (2005), both by Hilary Spurling and published by Knopf.
M. F. K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table, Joan Reardon (Harmony, 1994). Fisher, Child, and Waters were the pioneers in the American food world: due to Child’s PBS television series, the Food Network thrives today; due to Fisher’s passionate writing on gastronomy, cookbooks and food magazines grew to flourish; and Waters’s insistence upon fresh, seasonal food has prompted the growth of farmers’ markets and the local food movement.
Henry Miller: The Paris Years (Arcade, 1995), by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, whose given name was Gyula Halász.
Misia: The Life of Misia Sert, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale (Knopf, 1980). Misia tells the wildly entertaining but true tale of the vivacious socialite Misia (née Marie Sophie Olga Zenaide Godebska), whose third husband, the Spanish painter José-Maria Sert, decorated such spaces as Rockefeller Center and the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.
The Horizon Book of the Age of Napoléon (American Heritage, 1963).
How Far from Austerlitz?: Napoléon 1805–1815, Alistair Horne (St. Martin’s, 1997). The years 1996 and 1997 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Napoléon Bonaparte’s first successes in the Italian Campaign against Austria, causing historian Horne to reflect upon his earlier book Napoléon, Master of Europe, 1805–1807 and ask, “Did he deserve it? How did his reputation look, nearly two centuries later?” and “What paths led him to his final, wretched exile?” Austerlitz has been referred to as “the first great battle of modern history,” Horne notes, and was Napoléon’s greatest victory; it was also the beginning of Napoléon’s downfall. Though How Far from Austerlitz? isn’t a biography of Napoléon, it provides a great starting point from which to view his life. (The title of this excellent book, by the way, is taken from Rudyard Kipling’s “A St. Helena Lullaby,” which stuck in my head long after I’d finished reading. Each line of the poem begins with “How far is St. Helena …,” referring to the island where Napoléon served out his exile. One stanza is: “How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz? / You couldn’t hear me if I told—so loud the cannons roar.”)
Napoléon, Vincent Cronin (Collins, 1971).
Napoléon Bonaparte: A Life, Alan Schom (HarperCollins, 1997).
And though it’s historical fiction, a trilogy about the life of Joséphine Bonaparte is a unique take on the life of Napoléon’s wife: The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Joséphine B. (1999), Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe (1999), and The Last Great Dance on Earth (2000), all by Sandra Gulland and published by Scribner.
A Life of Picasso: The Prodigy, 1881–1906; The Cubist Rebel: 1907–1916; and The Triumphant Years: 1917–1932, all by John Richardson and published by Knopf (2007).
Life with Picasso, Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake (McGraw Hill, 1964). Gilot and Picasso never married but had two children together, Paloma and Claude; Gilot later married Jonas Salk in 1970. If you admire Gilot as much as I do, you may know she’s an accomplished artist in her own right: see Stone Echoes: Original Prints by Françoise Gilot, edited by Mel Yoakum (Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, 1995) for her printmaking oeuvre and Françoise Gilot: Monograph 1940–2000, Mel Yoakum and Dina Vierny (Acatos, 2001) for her oil paintings and works on paper.
Picasso: A Biography, Patrick O’Brian (Collins, 1976).
The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger (Penguin, 1965; Pantheon, 1989).
Renoir, My Father, Jean Renoir (Little, Brown, 1962; New York Review Books Classics, 2001).
Rodin: A Biography, Frederic Grunfeld (Henry Holt, 1987).
Rodin: The Shape of Genius, Ruth Butler (Yale University Press, 1993).
Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, Stacy Schiff (Knopf, 1994).
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vladimir Nabokov (Harper & Bros., 1951; Vintage, 1989, revised edition).
Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, Julia Frey (Viking, 1994).
Zola: A Life, Frederick Brown (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
The history of Paris lies in her buildings and monuments. That of the Parisians in a host of little details.
—Cahier de Paris
