The following cast has contributed to this survey of literary expatriates in Paris (and one in Rome) starting in the late 1940s and continuing to the 1990s.

NORMAN MAILER AND RICHARD WILBUR

Two of the most distinguished American literary artists of their generation—their names as frequently invoked by critics and historians as they are seldom linked—appear here in a conversation that is mostly about being in Pans after the Second World War. The occasion giving rise to this conversation was a late September, 1996, University of Pennsylvania weekend observation of my retirement from the English faculty there. When friends Norman Malier and Richard Wilbur accepted invitations to attend, I suggested talking about this experience that both had often said was personally important, that neither had ever overtly visited in his works, and that happened to have a particular relevance to the Penn audience in that season.

Penn’s entering class in 1996 had been assigned to read Hemingway’s A Mov…