Robert McAlmon

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Robert Menzies McAlmon (born March 9, 1895 in Clifton , Kansas , † February 2, 1956 in Desert Hot Springs , California ) was an American author and publisher who wrote the works of expatriate Americans in Paris in the 1920s in the publishing house founded jointly with Bryher Contact Editions published for the first time.

life and work

Robert McAlmon was the youngest son of ten children. The father was John Alexander McAlmon, a native of Ireland who emigrated to Canada , and his mother, Bess Urquhart McAlmon, was from Chatham, Ontario . The family moved to South Dakota . After finishing high school in 1912 and exercising various activities, he attended the University of Minnesota from 1916 to study literature, but, disaffected by his studies, followed his mother to California after his father's death in 1917. After a short period in the military, he took courses at the University of Southern California and in 1920, after a short stay in Chicago, settled in Greenwich Village in New York City , where he quickly made contact with the bohemian life there. He became close friends with the painter Marsden Hartley and William Carlos Williams ; with this together he published the literary magazine Contact , which appeared in five issues in the years 1920/21 and in 1923 in a final individual issue. Texts by writers such as Marianne Moore , Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens have been published .

In 1921 McAlmon married the daughter of a wealthy British shipowner, Annie Winifred Ellerman, who became known under her literary pseudonym Bryher . It was a "marriage of convenience" because she was lesbian and he was bisexual . They moved to Paris, where they founded Contact Editions in 1922 , which belonged to the Left Bank's art scene and which lasted until 1929. Contact Editions specialized in books with little commercial opportunity. The best-known works of the publisher in the Paris of the expatriates included Ernest Hemingway's first book Three Stories & Ten Poems , 1924, and Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans , 1925. HD's Palimpsest , Mina Loys Lunar Baedecker , poems by Marsden Hartley, William Carlos Williams Spring and All (1923) and McAlmon's own works were also published by Contact Editions .

McAlmon and Bryher were part of the Lost Generation's avant-garde literary scene like Ernest Hemingway, and they associated with James Joyce , Djuna Barnes , Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach , Kay Boyle , Mina Loy , Adrienne Monnier and Berenice Abbott . In 1927, the marriage with Bryher was divorced, it bothered them that he and his friends were prone to excessive alcohol. In the 1930s, McAlmon was mainly busy working on his autobiography Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography , which appeared in 1938.

When the Nazis invaded France, McAlmon was interned, but was released with the help of his family and returned in 1940 to the United States. In Phoenix , Texas , he found a job with a company selling medical equipment. His health deteriorated, he suffered from tuberculosis, among other things, and often had to be hospitalized. In 1956 he died in Desert Hot Springs .

In 2007 the work The Nightinghouls of Paris , previously only available as a typescript at Yale University , was published, in which the darker sides of the life of expatriates in Paris are described. The texts were lost while on the run in 1940, and McAlmon later recapitulated what had happened from memory.

plant

  • Exploration . Egoist Press, London 1921. Poems
  • A hasty bunch . Printed by Maurice Darantière in Dijon. 1922. Short stories
  • A companion volume . Contact Editions, Paris 1923. Short stories
  • Post-adolescence . Contact Editions, Paris 1923. Novel
  • Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period . Contact Editions, Paris 1924. Novel
  • Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales . Three Mountains Press, Paris 1925
  • The Portrait of a Generation . Contact Editions, Paris 1926. Poems
  • North America, Continent of Conjecture . Contact Editions, Paris 1929. Poems
  • The Infinite Huntress and Other Stories . Crosby, Paris 1932
  • Not Alone Lost . New Directions, Norfolk 1937. Poems
  • Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography . Secker & Warburg, London 1938. Expanded and revised edition by Kay Boyle , Doubleday, New York 1968
  • The Nightinghouls of Paris . Edited and online with an introduction by Sanford J. Smoller, University of Illinois Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-252-03135-9
as editor
  • Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers . Contact Editions, Three Mountains Press, Paris 1925.
Anthology with contributions by Djuna Barnes, Bryher, Mary Butts, HD, Norman Douglas, Havelock Ellis, Ford Madox Ford, Wallace Gould, Ernest Hemingway, Marsden Hartley, John Herrmann, James Joyce, Mina Loy, Robert McAlmon, Ezra Pound, Dorothy Richardson , May Sinclair, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams.

Secondary literature

  • John Glassco: The Crazy Years. A young man's adventure in Paris . With an introduction by Louis Begley, German by Matthias Fienbork. Hanser, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-446-23272-3 .
  • Sanford J. Smoller: Among Geniuses: Robert McAlmon, Writer and Publisher of the Twenties . Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975, ISBN 978-0-271-01173-8 .
  • Andrea Weiss: Paris was a woman. The women from the Left Bank. Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein & Co. reissued. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 978-3-499-24224-3 .

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ^ University of South Carolina
  2. ↑ Andrea Weiss: Paris was a woman , p. 186
  3. ^ The Nightinghouls of Paris
personal data
SURNAME McAlmon, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McAlmon, Robert Menzies (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author and publisher
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Clifton , Kansas
DATE OF DEATH 2nd February 1956
Place of death Desert Hot Springs , California