Beau Shipley and Keeby Styles barely survive the WWI battle of the Meuse-Argonne. Beau returns to Charleston in a fatalistic attempt to stop his former girlfriend's wedding to a rival, while Keeby remains in Paris to become a writer. Beau discovers that time, the war, the Spanish Flu, and a dark family secret have left the Charleston he remembered unrecognizable, so he returns to Paris to live as a painter. On separate but intertwining paths, Beau and Keeby are swept up in what Gertrude Stein called the Lost Generation, two aspirants mired in the panoramic parade of ambitious expats seeking fame and fortune in the world of arts and letters. Then, drunken and desperate, Beau one night makes a fateful choice that will change both their lives—forever. 22 Rue Montparnasse is a tale about high aspirations and bad decisions, with cameo appearances by the likes of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Tsugahiro Foujita, Ernest Hemingway, Georges Brach, Amedeo Modigliani, Misia Sert, Coco Chanel, and Ezra Pound.