The History and Culture of Literary Cafés of Europe
by Richard Wolak
Noël Riley Fitch is an award-winning biographer and historian of expatriate intellectuals in Paris during the first half of the 1900s.
She is a full-time writer, lectures widely, and teaches a professional writing course at the University of Southern California (during the regular academic year) and a summer literature course at the American University in Paris.
In addition to being frequently interviewed on radio and television, she has appeared in several documentary films, including Berenice Abbott: A View of the Twentieth Century (1992) and the A&E biography of Julia Child first shown October 14, 1997, which is based on Fitch's Biography of Julia Child, Appetite for Life.
Fitch earned a Ph.D. in literature from Washington State University and has taught in Washington, Massachusetts, and California. She has edited a book entitled Faith and Imagination with Richard Etulain and published scholarly and journalistic articles in numerous periodicals.
Following Fitch's earlier Literary Cafés of Paris, she recently returned this travel genre to author The Grand Literary Cafés of Europe (London, 2006; US, 2007). Photographs are by Andy Midgley. This book covers the history of coffee and the coffeehouse and features nearly 40 cafes in 20 countries, from London to Moscow, Lisbon to Bucharest and Rome.
Her most recent book, co-authored with illustrator Rick Tulka, is Paris Café:The Sélect Crowd (Nov. 2007), It is the first personal inside look into the workings and daily rhythm of a café and its famous as well as anonymous clientele.
Noël Riley Fitch (1937-) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and educated at Northwest Nazarene College (B.A., 1959) and Washington State University (M.A., 1965 and Ph.D., 1969). She was professor of literature (1971-1987) and chair of the Department of Literature and Modern Languages (1982 -1985) at Point Loma College. She lectures at the University of Southern California (since 1986) and the American University of Paris (since 1987).
As a scholar of American expatriate intellectuals living in Paris in the first half of this century, Fitch cast a new perspective on Paris literary life with her first biography, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 1983. Anatole Broyard of the New York Times called it "probably the best and most complete history of that period." Her 1990 Walks in Hemingway's Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveler is a compendium of locations where the American author and his friends lived, ate, and socialized in Paris.
Fitch continued her investigation of the literary life in Paris with her 1993 biography of another prominent Paris personality, Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) authored more than a dozen books of fiction and erotica over the course of her life. She was a cult figure of the feminist movement who, as a liberated woman, broke the confines of American Victorianism. Although Nin published her diaries over the years, literary critics believe that they present a constructed, stylized image of the woman. Fitch analyzed the novelist's/diarist's own writings to create an in-depth examination of Nin who was as well known for her literary work as for her numerous and unconventional love affairs. For example, Nin's illicit relationship with Henry Miller and his wife, June, was explored in the 1990 Hollywood feature film, Henry and June. Fitch sought to present an honest portrait of the author that reveals the psychological abuse that Nin suffered as a child and may have led to her lifelong insecurities.
Fitch also wrote Literary Cafes of Paris (1989), and contributed to Faith and Imagination: Essays on Evangelicals and Literature (editor with Richard W. Etulain, 1985), and In Transition: A Paris Anthology (introduction, 1990).
POSTED: Saturday, May 26, 2007