William L Shirer's Paris

Historian William L Shirer was born in 1904 in Chicago Illinois. He grew up in Cedar Rapids Iowa during the Coolidge years in a rural, religious and drab environment. After attending college, where he studied journalism, he set out on a cattle boat for Europe to seek fame and fortune as a fiction writer. He secured employment at an American newspaper in Paris in 1925 and spent the next two decades living and working in some of Europe's great capital cities - Paris, Vienna and Berlin.

Shirer first lived in a Paris pension on Boulevard Port Royal.

His first job for the Paris Edition of the Chicago Tribune was at the Petit Journal building - 3rd Floor, 5 Rue Lamartine in the 9th Arrondissement. The paper reported serious news of European events and politics back home to America but also the gossip and intrigues of the American colony in Paris. The mid-1920's in Paris saw many of leading intellectual and artistic writers, artists, poets and musicians descend on the city to enjoy its freedoms (particularly the freedom to drink alcohol) which were not available in the USA. Shirer encountered Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber, F Scott Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, Grant Wood and many others.

His initial breakthrough professional achievement occurred in May 1927 when Charles Lindbergh became the first person to successfully cross the Atlantic Ocean by air, landing at Paris' Le Bourget field where Shirer was on hand to cover the landing and developing story of the new hero. Although he moved throughout his life as a foreign correspondent, Shirer always referred to Paris as his home.