As the story goes, Baldwin was only 24 when he arrived in Paris, with just $40 in his pocket. Having not yet found his success as a writer in the US, he had left New York to escape American racism — an escape that he believed saved his life and made it possible for him to write. It is in Paris, at the great cafés of the 5th arrondissement that Baldwin hoped to finish his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain(1953). Here Baldwin found a place within a diverse community of creative types.

Baldwin fell in love with the city, not only because of its beauty and culture but also because of the reprieve it provided from the racial and sexual discrimination he experienced in the United States. But Baldwin did find trouble there, having been arrested and put in a Paris jail, he details the experience in his essay, Equal in Paris. Paris did provide Baldwin the space to be himself creatively and also served as the backdrop for his second novel, Giovanni's Room.

"For Paris is, according to its legend, the city where everyone loses his head, and his morals, lives through at least one histoire d’amour, ceases, quite, to arrive anywhere on time, and thumbs his nose at the Puritans--the city, in brief, where all become drunken on the fine old air of freedom."--“A Question of Identity” in Notes of a Native Son