Bricktop's Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World Wars

by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting

2015 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Longlisted for the 2015 American Library in Paris Book Award

During the Jazz Age, France became a place where an African American woman could realize personal freedom and creativity, in narrative or in performance, in clay or on canvas, in life and in love. These women were participants in the life of the American expatriate colony, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Cole Porter, and they commingled with bohemian avant-garde writers and artists like Picasso, Breton, Colette, and Matisse. Bricktop's Paris introduces the reader to twenty-five of these women and the city they encountered. Following this nonfiction account, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting provides a fictionalized autobiography of Ada "Bricktop" Smith, which brings the players from the world of nonfiction into a Paris whose elegance masks a thriving underworld.

Genres: History, Biography

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 31, 2015

Reviews

[Burnsie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a valuable look at an under-reported aspect of artistic life in Paris between the two world wars; specifically, the experiences of expatriot African-American female performers, writers, artists and thinkers. The book is informative, written in a lively style, and packed with first-hand accounts. I might have given it more stars except for the author's frequent use of convoluted run-on sentences and challenges with punctuation. Adnittedly, not all scholars are elegant or proficient writers, but that is what editors are for. I was dismayed by the seeming absence of competent editorial oversight to counsel the author on these excesses and errors, an absence particularly of note given the publisher is a university press.

[Mills College Library]

305.48896 S5326b 2015

[Angchronicles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A creative and scholarly read. Learn about the black women movers and shakers living in Paris, then read a mystery novel.