History & Area Studies / Thematic History / Social & Cultural History

The Secret Paris Years That Created America's Biggest Icons

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis

Alice Kaplan

Think you know America's greatest female icons? You are totally wrong. Before the White House, before the fame, before the revolution... there was Paris. This is the untold story of how escaping to France literally rewired three legendary women. Jackie Kennedy did not learn elegance in America. She learned the cold art of political aesthetics from Holocaust survivors in a shattered post-war Paris. Susan Sontag? She abandoned her husband and five-year-old child to dive right into underground Parisian sensory liberation. And Angela Davis found the exact radical vocabulary in French that would later ignite a global revolution. Three completely different social classes. Three clashing ideologies. One identical catalyst. This completely shatters the illusion of the American Dream. Sometimes true power is only found by abandoning your mother tongue. Uncover the shocking truth documented in the book Dreaming in French. Written by Alice Kaplan, former Yale University Professor of French Literature. Kaplan spent years digging up these buried micro-histories to reveal how foreign isolation forces radical self-discovery. Get ready to see how a foreign city secretly engineered the political and intellectual landscape of the modern world. By the end, you will question everything about how your own environment is secretly controlling your destiny.