American migration to Europe
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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During the 19th century artistic Americans flocked to Europe—especially to Munich and Paris—to study the art of painting. Henry James was a famous expatriate American writer from the 1870s, who adopted England as his home.
The first wave of famous expatriates was the so-called "Lost Generation," a term referring to American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. This group included people such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. African-American expatriation to Paris also boomed after World War I, beginning with black American veterans who preferred the subtler racism of Paris to the oppressive racism and segregation in the United States, which often involved lynchings in the American South. In the 1920s African-American writers, artists, and musicians arrived in Paris and popularized jazz in Parisian nightclubs, a time when Montmartre was know as "the Harlem of Paris." Some notable African-American expatriates from the 1920s onward included Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker.
The second wave of expatriates was the so-called Beat Generation of American artists living in other countries during the 1950s and 1960s. This group included Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Harold Norse, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder.
Later generation expatriates included 1950s jazz musicians such as Steve Lacy, 1960s rock musician Jim Morrison, and 1970s singer-songwriter Elliott Murphy.
See
- Lost Generation
- Beat Generation
- Negrophilia
- Exiled in Paris is a 1994 (reprinted 2001) book by James Campbell