Author Description

These stories portray characters and settings ranging from children in the Midwest to artists and writers in Greenwich Villiage to flappers and prostitutes in Paris. All these people and places come out of the life of Robert McAlmon, the expatriate American author and publisher whose writings are finding an audience only now, some fifty years after his death. Post-Adolescence, the short novel that leads off the collection, will be of special interest to aficionados of the glory days of American bohemianism for its portraits of William Carlos Williams and his wife, Florence, Mardsen Hartley, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Alfred Kreymbourg, and Kenneth Burke. This unsparingly realistic diary of pre-1920 Greenwich Village has never before been published in the United States. But equally exciting are McAlmon's matter-of-fact evocations of encouters with sex, violence, and death in such stories as The Fast Girl, Green Grow the Grasses, The Jack Rabbit Drive, and A Boy's Discovery, as well as A Vacation's Job and Mexican Interval, which describe the author's sojourns in Mexico and the West before he went to seek his literary fortune.