The Visitable Past - A Wartime Memoir (Hardcover, illustrated edition)

The Visitable Past: A Wartime Memoir is a fascinating account of the late Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer's experience as a member of a psychological warfare unit during the liberation of France. Arriving in Normandy a month after D-Day, Edel was part of the De Gaulle force that entered Paris, the scene of his own student days during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In his Foreword, Edel describes his method as "trying to let one kind of story beget another; one moment of experience summon a series of past moments". The Visitable Past is therefore not only an account of France recovering from its years of occupation, but also a memoir of Edel's earlier Parisian days as a young man of letters. Wartime encounters with Sylvia Beach and Morton Fullerton lead to recollections of James Joyce, Edith Wharton, and Edel's own early work on Henry James.