"I Cannot Get Along without the Books I Find Here": The American Library in Paris during the War, Occupation, and Liberation, 1939-1945

The American Library in Paris remained open to readers throughout World War II, and its history during the darkest period of the occupation is a tribute to the leadership and courage of an American-born countess, Clara Longworth de Chambrun, and her small but dedicated staff. This article presents the drama as it unfolded—-through the phony war, the fall of Paris, and the bleak years following the American declaration of war on Germany. The concluding section offers a brief analysis of the American Library’s unlikely survival and explores its complicated wartime history by using concepts borrowed from institutional sociology. Introduction During the war scare that preceded the Munich Agreement of 1938, Dorothy Reeder, the dynamic director of the American Library in Paris, declared: “We did not close, we had no idea of closing. Each member of the staff was notified to go and was told that whatever they decided was right. They all stayed. . . . Our public took it for granted we would continue war or no war and many offered volunteer help. After all the Library was founded in the last war.”1 The following September, just days after the French and British declaration of war on Germany, the American Library in Paris launched an ambitious volunteer service to send books and magazines to soldiers. Dorothy Reeder later wrote that the American Library’s mission was to “help to serve in the field of morale to the best of its ability.”2 Because the library was founded as a memorial to those who died in the First World “I Cannot Get Along without the Books I Find Here”: The American Library in Paris during the War, Occupation, and Liberation, 1939–1945