Books in Brief: The Paris Edition

The Paris Edition: The Autobiography of Waverley Root 1927-1934, edited and with an introduction by Samuel Abt (North Point, 224 pp„ $16.95)

It is once again Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, and if not as lyrical as Hemingway’s moveable feast, it is almost as irresistible. Waverley Root went to Paris in 1927 and joined the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition, which was sold and killed seven years later. These are his memoirs of the time, suffused with fondness and not a little amazement at his own youthful good fortune, first at being a newspaperman, and then at being a newspaperman in the literary hotbed that was Paris. For these—despite cameo appearances by Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—are a journalist’s stories, full of printer’s ink and headline writing and copy-desk characters. “We worked on the Paris Edition because it was a club and a cult, because we liked each other, because we loved putting out the paper,” writes Root without apology. The Paris Edition may be short on the History contained in other memoirs of the period (one thinks of William Shirer, a contemporary and sometime colleague of Root, and his Twentieth-Century Journey books), but it is long on humor and humanity. Root, who died in Paris in 1982 at the age of 79, left seven hundred pages of memoirs, and the measure of how good these selections are is that the reader finishes wanting more.

JM

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Joe Mysak

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The Paris Edition: The Autobiography of Waverley Root 1927-1934, edited and with an introduction by Samuel Abt (North Point, 224 pp„ $16.95)

It is once again Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, and if not as lyrical as Hemingway’s moveable feast, it is almost as irresistible. Waverley Root went to Paris in 1927 and joined the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition, which was sold and killed seven years later. These are his memoirs of the time, suffused with fondness and not a little amazement at his own youthful good fortune, first at being a newspaperman, and then at being a newspaperman in the literary hotbed that was Paris. For these—despite cameo appearances by Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—are a journalist’s stories, full of printer’s ink and headline writing and copy-desk characters. “We worked on the Paris Edition because it was a club and a cult, because we liked each other, because we loved putting out the paper,” writes Root without apology. The Paris Edition may be short on the History contained in other memoirs of the period (one thinks of William Shirer, a contemporary and sometime colleague of Root, and his Twentieth-Century Journey books), but it is long on humor and humanity. Root, who died in Paris in 1982 at the age of 79, left seven hundred pages of memoirs, and the measure of how good these selections are is that the reader finishes wanting more.