415Z Winter 2026 “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s in Paris and New York City

The 1920s were a swinging era, with exciting developments happening in the arts, particularly in literature. Paris and New York City were both centers of creative activity, with groups of American writers socializing together. Who were “such friends”? They talked, they drank, they partied, and sometimes they worked. We will focus on the relationships among the American ex-patriates in Paris who visited Gertrude Stein’s salon and Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, as well as New York’s Algonquin Round Table who started The New Yorker magazine and lunched regularly at the Algonquin Hotel. Nearby, Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins was guiding the budding careers of novelists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. A suggested reading list will be provided, but no reading or textbooks are required.

Dr. Kathleen Donnelly recently retired from Birmingham [UK] City University and relocated to her hometown, Pittsburgh. She has given presentations in the UK and the U.S. on her research on writers’ salons. Her blog, “Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago, is collected in “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s on Amazon.