The American girl in Paris is a trope as iconic as the three subjects of Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, though it's a somewhat unexpected triumvirate: their primary commonality would seem to be a certain transcendence to a cultural shorthand— to personae so identifiable as to make for lazy Halloween costumes. But in examining each woman's relationship to postwar Paris, Kaplan arrives at larger common themes: not merely of experience, but of what it meant to be an American, and a woman, in the 20th century.
