The Road Back to Paris (Modern Library)

About this book

Originally published in 1944 The Road Back to Paris comprises dispatches from France England and North Africa that A. J. Liebling filed with The New Yorker during the Second World War. The magazine sent Liebling to Paris in 1939 hoping that he could replicate in wartime France his brilliant reporting of New York life. Liebling succeeded triumphantly concentrating on writing the individual soldiers story to illuminate the larger picture of the European theater of the war and the fight for what Liebling felt was the first priority of business: the liberation of his beloved France. The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Librarys seventy-fifth anniversary Random House redesigned the series restoring as its emblem the running torch-bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets bindings and type as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the worlds best books at the best prices. For a complete list of titles see the inside of the jacket. Despite his ill health and bad eyesight Liebling went on patrol interviewed soldiers fled Paris and returned after D-Day was shot at in North Africa and bombed in the blitz in London. Into this chaos as his biographer Raymond Sokolov comments "he brought himself a fiercely committed Francophile with a novelists skill for crystallizing his day-to-day experiences into a profound chronicle of a world knocked down. "