L’après-guerre ou la tentation internationaliste des intellectuels critiques (1919-1922)

In this extract from her 2012 unpublished manuscript, Les Intellectuels critiques aux Etats-Unis. 1913-1933. Chronique d’une generation oubliee, Anne Ollivier-Mellios offers insight into the rich transatlantic exchanges between American and French intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of the First World War and in the continuity of peace activism. Through personal letters and published editorials, she maps the attempts to set up international organizations, and she records how French and American radical or liberal intellectuals struggled to find a common definition of the commitment, role and means of political action of the artist or writer. Ultimately she suggests that these earlier transatlantic debates informed local achievements but also the rifts and failures in New York’s intellectual circles in the 1930s.