Last week, quietly, death came to a man and an era in American life.
The man was Harold Edmund Stearns, critic and essayist. The era was that in which Americans believed that their own civilization could not be lived in and those who had the courage of their convictions became expatriates.
In the 1920s, when U.S. prosperity was at its crest, the lives of the young Americans who had transplanted themselves to Paris had three fixed pointsthe Dome, the Select, the Rotonde. To these world-famed cafés, at some time or other, came all American exiles: Ernest Hemingway, Elliot Paul, F. Scott...