"It isn't often that a scholarly study of avant-garde literature and the arts running to some 400 pages acquires the status of a literary classic, but that has been the happy fate of a delightful book called, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, whose author -- the American writer and translator Roger Shattuck -- died on Dec. 8 at the age of 82. Amazingly, The Banquet Years, published in 1968, remains in print to this very day, and both its sly humor and its brilliant combination of anecdote and analysis are as fresh, as amusing and as essential to our understanding of the modern era as the day it was published. So are the deft portraits of the book's principal subjects -- Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, Erik Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire -- a quartet of gifted misfits and oddball talents whose accomplishments, though scarcely noticed by the reigning eminences of French cultural life, offered a preview of the modernism that would in many respects give the arts of the 20th century their special character. ..."
WSJ: Remembering 'The Banquet Years' By Hilton Kramer
New Republic - Half Tame
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1) -- La belle époque (The Good Old Days)
[PDF] The Banquet Years
amazon
Jean Beraud, The Boulevard Montmartre and the Theatre des Varietes (c1886)
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