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DAVID BURKE’S WRITERS IN PARIS WALKS

In his book Writers in Paris literary detective David Burke explores the most creative quarters of the city – the Latin Quarter, the Marais, raffish Montmartre, “Lost Generation” Montparnasse – and tracks down the haunts of dozens of the world’s finest and most colorful writers.  From Molière, Baudelaire, and Proust to expatriates Hemingway, Joyce, and Beckett we follow their artistic struggles and breakthroughs, along with the splendors and miseries of their invariably complicated personal lives. 

Now you can walk and talk with the author, experience the lives of your literary heroes, and get to know new ones.  David Burke takes you to key places for fictional characters as well.  As we stroll along the atmospheric streets we soak up the history of bygone Paris, enlivened all the more by the companionship of a Victor Hugo, an Oscar Wilde, or an Ernest Hemingway.  

MOI, DAVID
AND HOW MY WRITERS IN PARIS WALKS 
CAME INTO BEING

Writing my book Writers in Paris, Literary Lives in the City of Light, was one of the most captivating adventures of my life,  tracking down the haunts of many of the most important and most colorful writers of all time, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century, while at the same time digging into hundreds (if not thousands!) of their novels, poems, and plays, and biographies about them.  Literary heaven! 

I never thought, while I was writing the book, at least not consciously, that one day I’d be doing literary walks. 

But look what I wrote in the Introduction:

 “Just as our writers were enriched by living  in Paris, our appreciation of their lives and their work  – and indeed of the city itself – is heightened by following them from place to place in our imaginations or, even better, in our walking shoes.” 

And what do you know!  After the first reading I did when the book came out (at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s magnificent house in Lenox, MA), a lady asked me as I was signing a copy, “Do you do walks in Paris?”  That was the start of my beautiful friendship with Martha and her husband John, and also the start of a new career as a walking tour guide – and in a very big way.  They came to Paris with thirty-eight friends.  Too many for a walk.  So I divided them into smaller groups.  We had a marvelous time, me included.  Here’s a snapshot of me and one of my squads at the Place des Vosges. 

And here’s the picture I’m showing in my book: Georges Simenon at the bar in his apartment with a silhouette of his girlfriend Josephine Baker on the wall.

Now, thanks to my far more developed Writers in Paris Walking Tours program, you can walk and talk with me in person in no less than eight parts of the city as we visit key places in the lives of my army of writers and fictional characters they created. 

THE WALKS section tells you all about them.