If there's a literary bone in your body, you'll feel a vicarious thrill on discovering the haunts of the writers and artists who've lived, worked, and played in Paris.
Take the Métro to place St-Michel to begin your tour. As you wander away from the Seine, you'll encounter rue de la Huchette, one of the Left Bank's most famous streets. Its inhabitants were immortalized in Eliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris. Continuing on, you'll enter the territory of the Beat Generation, home to the Café Gentilhomme (no longer there) described by Jack Kerouac in Satori in Paris. Allen Ginsberg's favorite, the Hôtel du Vieux-Paris, 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, 6e, still attracts those in search of the Beats.
Stroll down rue Monsieur-le-Prince, the "Yankee alleyway," where Richard Wright, James McNeill Whistler, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes lived at one time or another. During a visit in 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to call on Richard Wright, the Mississippi-born African-American novelist famous for Native Son. King climbed to the third-floor apartment at no. 14 to find that Wright's opinions on the civil-rights movement conflicted with his own. Whistler rented a studio at no. 22, and in 1826, Longfellow lived at no. 49. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., lived at no. 55. After strolling along this street, you can dine at the haunts of Kerouac and Hemingway. (See our recommendation of Crémerie-Restaurant Polidor, 41 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, 6e.) Or cross back over to the Right Bank for a drink at the famed Hôtel de Crillon, 10 place de la Concorde, 8e, where heroine Brett Ashley broke her promise to rendezvous with Jake Barnes in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald lifted their glasses here as well.
