Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres, 1933-1950

Henry Holt & Co, 1983. First Edition. Hardcover. Like New. 1983 STATED FIRST AMERICAN EDITION hardcover with dust jacket. Well-preserved UNREAD COPY with unmarked, crisp-edged, well-bound pages. Jacket remains clean and bright with only extremely minor shelf rubbing. Nice copy! "Before the smog, Los Angeles represented a sunny, carefree paradise where the living was easy for generations of Americans who followed Horace Greeley's advice to 'Go West, young man!' Its appeal was even more intense in the 1930s to Europeans with more urgent reasons to look westward. From the time of Hitler's coming to power in 1933, there was a steady stream of liberal and Jewish Germans -- among them the cream of the intelligentsia -- who needed a rallying point to build a New Weimar and preserve German culture from the holocaust. Los Angeles filled the bill, and as Nazi Germany gradually overran the rest of Europe, the stream of emigres became a flood. Austrians, Czechs, French, Scandinavians, British all tended to find themselves temporarily or permanently marooned in southern California. John Russell Taylor, biographer of one of the most distinguished emigres, Alfred Hitchcock, chronicles in his new book the varied fortunes of this varied group. Not only did such leading figures of world cinema as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel all come to Hollywood to work -- as best they could in these alien surroundings -- but Los Angeles, alleged cultural desert, also offered a home to such writers as Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Franz Werfel, Christopher Isherwood, Antione de Saint-Exupery and Bertolt Brecht and such composers as Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as well as a host of designers, actors, and musicians. The story of how they came to terms (or did not) with their new environment, the Americans and one another is frequently bizarre, often funny and sometimes tragic. It is also a long overdue account of an important, neglected, imperfectly understood episode in the cultural history of twentieth-century America.