In Bohemian Paris, Dan Franck leads us on a magical exploration of the city and its hotbeds of artistic creation. He introduces erudite and eros-obsessed poet Guillaume Apollinaire; the painter Amedeo Modigliani, generous to a fault even when starving; the opportunistic but brilliant Jean Cocteau; rival geniuses Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. We encounter American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and form-breaking modern writer and salonist nonpareil Gertrude Stein.

Painters and writers, sculptors and poets, they lived like characters in a Balzac story, working, loving, and struggling against a backdrop of extravagant parties and dire poverty. With a novelist's verve and a historian's skill, Dan Franck paints this remarkable time, capturing the beauty and vitality distilled from these artists' lives, which became the cornerstones of great art.