what european literary giant or character would you hang out with if you could??

Well, LL, since I've been trying to get into Dante's Inferno, these days I'd choose Dante to talk to directly. I'm still muddling through Dorothy Sayer's introduction and I have the Teaching Company's tapes to assist, but there is so much to understand before one even begins reading and I expect I'll want Dante to explain some things himself. My general knowledge of medieval Europe just won't be enough and the historians never agree!

The Marquis de Sade (just kidding).<BR>

As I posted on another thread along these lines, my friend would be the bawdy queen of Montparnesse, KIKI.An exlover of Manray, modeling for all the artists of that period. Hangos out with everyone from Colette to Hemingway. She kbnew, slept, or danced with everyone

spelling police:I KNOW&lt; I KNOW!<BR>;

Piaf or maybe Coco Chanel, I like these French women who overcame great hardship and became legends...and I want to live in Paris in the "old days"

Shanna, Sorry your comment made me laugh. '...I've been trying to get into Dante's Inferno....

Love to have a go at Henry. Take him to task for all the Cathedrals, Monasteries, Castles, etc., he destroyed in the name of gluttony. Of course, I would like to have the US Special Forces with me.

Poor lovesick Petrarch. Or Dante, exiled when he was on a trip elsewhere. Giovanni Boccaccio, author of "The Decameron" would also be pretty entertaining.<BR><BR>BC

Shanna have you seen the Pinsky edition of Dante's Inferno?My friend's brother-in-law illustrated it.

Ahhh! To have hung out at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare & Co; to have met Joyce & Beckett, drunk w/ F. Scott & danced in a fountain w/ Zelda, disdained Hemingway in person, eaten Adrienne Monnier's famous chicken dinner, giggled as George Antheuil (sp?) climbed the side of the bldg. to get to his apt. above Sylvia's bookstore, listened to T.S. Eliot recite his own poetry. Yup, the '20s are DEFINITELY my era!<BR><BR>Mary

A conversation with Sartre,Jean Cocteau,Marcel Duchamp,Gaugin,Latrec,different times, but I would love to sit and talk about everything and anything with these people~

Samuel Johnson & his circle, Boswell, Goldsmith & the rest of them, very high-spirited, vigorous, humorous and sometimes caustic people who appear to have actually had fun in life and seem to have been able to bring out wit and insightful observations from a lot of ordinary people they came upon whom many intellectuals would likely have felt oppressed by.<BR><BR>Ben Jonson's literary drinking circle, "The Sons of Ben", seem to have operated along similar lines.<BR><BR>I would love to visit Periclean Athens and talk to Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Alcibiades, Aristophanes, etc, though I would need a long visit to get my Ancient Greek up to dialogue speed.<BR><BR>Bohemian London between the wars and the first few years after them.<BR><BR>Tolstoy.