Providing first-hand accounts of Joyce's Paris circle - which included Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov - the book makes available again the text of Lucie (Leon) Noel's personal memoir of the relationship between her husband and the Irish writer (published as James Joyce and Paul L. Leon: The Story of Friendship in 1950), including his valiant rescue of Joyce's Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. The book also collects for the first time Leon's clandestine letters to his wife from August to December 1941, chronicling his desperate state of body and mind while interned in Drancy, France's main Nazi transit camp, and then in Compiegne, just before he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Joyce died suddenly on 13 January 1941 in Zurich and Leon was murdered by the Nazis on 4 April 1942 in Silesia.
Annotated throughout with contextual commentary by Luca Crispi and Mary Gallagher, this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of Paris in the 1930s and first years of World War II in France.