In 2013, I submitted a short article for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The encyclopedia is slated to be published online in 2015-2016. Here is a short excerpt of the article:

[Morand’s] voluminous writings, and in particular his travel journals and novels, have seen numerous editions, from 1988 to the late 1990s, and in 2001, his Journal inutile, (eds. Laurent and Véronique Boyer) was finally published. Most of Morand’s major literary successes are rooted in the short story and travel writing genres, although he aspired to be a novelist. Two themes are dominant in his writings, and collateral to his experience of traveling: the idea of speed, developed throughout his obsession with anything fast (On speed, 1929, and L’homme pressé, 1941); and his own perception of French cultural decline. Open All Night (1922) and Closed All Night (1923), a diptych about his diplomatic experience develop those two themes through several instant portraits of women the narrator is courting.

Morand is perhaps best known for his association with fascism, although, prior to the 1930s, he was a well-known travel witer. He invented a whole new sub-genre of travel writing, the city biography, a particular type of travel journal written about cities that he first debuted and tailored for New York City, a city he admired and lived in briefly.

The city portraits are at the intersection between journalism and travel journals, made of a succession of vignettes meant to evoke speed and displacement, like the rest of Morand’s work, geared around his own sense of disconnect and cosmopolitanism.