Hi, I'm Ralf Heinritz, a German, born in Dortmund in 1959 and now again living in the western part of the Federal Republic of Germany: in Nordrhein-Westfalen near the border with the Netherlands.
I used to be active here, some 15 years ago and I plan on revisiting my old stuff, but at the moment I have to concentrate on work on US expatriate writers. People, who have for some time lived abroad. A list of these was the last thing I did here. The USA is a nation of immigrants. But some people also returned to their places of origin. And some did not move West, but East (or further west to Japan and to China).
Some settled in foreign lands, some not. Some had jobs, some "only" wrote. The most famous group of US-"writers in exile" is of course the Lost Generation (Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald; Cummings for a shorter time, John Peale Bishop, Malcolm Cowley; and lots of lesser lights; Henry Miller went to Paris after the Jazz Age had ended), all of them "white" males; but there also were women (Djuna Barnes), and African American authors (and Jazz musicians and Josephine Baker) in Paris at the time: L. Hughes, Cl. McKay, J. Toomer. Paris was an very attractive place also after W W 2 (among many others: Richard Wright, James Baldwin; the people from the Paris Review, the Beat Generation, J. Ashbery for a while, H. Matthews, J. Jones) and still is. Frank Yerby and Chester Himes settled in Spain, also R, Creeley for a time. Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy lived in Europe, Sylvia Plath and R. Lowell, and Ed Dorn, and 1960s New Wave science fiction writers in England. The Irish-American author of "the Ginger Man" went back to Ireland for good. Elizabeth Bishop was in Brazil, Cid Corman lived in Japan, George Oppens and his wife fled "McCarthyism" and settled in Mexico, other blacklisted Communists went to Canada. W. S. Burroughs lived in Mexico, in Tangiers (like Paul and Jane Bowles), in Paris. Allen Ginsberg moved all over the globe in the 1960s. After the end of 1960s Black Power and The Black Panther Party Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis, later Stokeley Carmichael and Huey Newton fled the USA for a time.
But of course Americans went to Europe (and the Loyalists to Canada) as soon as the Republic was born. Liberia was founded in the 1820sas a place for Free Negroes who wanted to return to Africa. The painter Benjamin West, later on N. Hawthorne and Henry James and Mark Twain, Ezra Pound, H.D., T. S. Eliot, E. Hemingway were giants of US-culture, who lived abroad for at least some years. Many Jazz musicians (from the 1920s to Free Jazz/New Thing in the 1960s/70s) and esp. many film-"auteurs" (1950s/60s) could not or would not make a living at home.--Ralfdetlef (talk) 19:13, 4 June 2022 (UTC)