Michael Gorra on the historical appeal of Europe to American travelers

“Americans used to go to Europe in search of a larger life. We went because living abroad expanded our sense of what an American could be; offered, paradoxically, a different and richer and grander way of being an American than we could find at home. In [Henry] James’s day we came to grasp at an antique culture, to talk with a history that stretched back beyond our grandparents; in the 1920’s, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald joined Gertrude Stein in Paris, escaping the insular prohibitions of Main Street. Later, black writers and musicians (James Baldwin, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis) traveled to Europe, because there they could be American in a way that they couldn’t in America itself. But in a sense this was true for all Americans, James included: Europe allowed us to see ourselves in purely national terms, to shuck the more local affiliations of race or region or even family.”
— Michael Gorra, “Innocents Abroad?”, Travel + Leisure, May 2003