Emigré New York

the long version

"Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism, in the person of Maurice Maeterlinck, came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism, in the person of Andre Breton, came to survive; and where French structuralism, in the person of Claude Levi-Strauss, came to be born. From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Petain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France's floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, during one of the most vexed periods in French history."--BOOK JACKET.