Walking Paris with Henry Miller

A visitor to the Tschann bookstore in December 1934 would have been greeted by a unique display in the shop’s window: a green and black illustration depicting a woman being devoured by a giant crab which adorned the cover of Miller’s newly published Tropic of Cancer. The book was printed with a paper wrapper bearing [...]

During the twenties and thirties, the building at 29-31 rue Vavin was occupied by a Scandinavian themed café called Le Viking, which featured live jazz and dancing. Miller described the Viking in a March 1931 letter to Emil Schnellock: Cold Greenland women at the Viking blazing under polar ice, their blond wigs refulgent with exotic heat. [...]

La Rotonde opened in 1911 and became a hangout for Lenin, Trotsky and other Russian Bolshevik exiles who crowded the tables playing chess and discussing politics prior to the great war. The Rotonde was also a common meeting point for artists such as Picasso, Modigliani and Max Jacob, who flocked to Montparnasse in the artistic [...]

Le Select opened its doors in 1925 and was the first Montparnasse café to remain open all night. The air of sexual freedom permeating Montparnasse between the world wars was nowhere more evident than at the Select, which quickly became a popular hangout for homosexuals. Samuel Putnam recalls that Emma Goldman, the anarchist who was [...]