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=                           Robert_McAlmon                           =
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                            Introduction
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Robert Menzies McAlmon (also used Robert M. McAlmon, as his signature
name, March 9, 1895 - February 2, 1956) was an American writer, poet,
and publisher.  In the 1920s, he founded in Paris the publishing
house, 'Contact Editions', where he published Ernest Hemingway,
Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.


                                Life
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McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of 10 children of an
itinerant Presbyterian minister. He died in Desert Hot Springs,
California, at age 60.

McAlmon studied for one semester as the University of Minnesota in
1916 before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps in 1918.
After World War I, he returned to university (1917-1920), this time at
the University of Southern California. He attended classes
intermittently until 1920, when he moved to Chicago and then New York
City, where he worked as a nude model at an art school. Once in New
York, he collaborated with William Carlos Williams on the 'Contact
Review', which did not last for long but published poetry by Ezra
Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, H.D., Kay Boyle, and Marsden
Hartley.

The next year, he moved to Paris after marrying the wealthy English
writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known as Bryher. This was a
marriage of convenience which allowed Ellerman, a lesbian, to continue
her relationship with Hilda Doolittle, and guarded McAlmon after he
publicly identified himself as bisexual, stating: "I'm bisexual
myself, like Michelangelo, and I don't give a damn who knows it."
Ellerman divorced McAlmon in 1927.

McAlmon typed and edited the handwritten manuscript of Ulysses by
James Joyce, with whom he had a friendship.

McAlmon became a prolific writer after the move, with many of his
stories and poems based on his experiences as a youth in South Dakota.


                          Contact editions
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Having published his book of short stories 'A Hasty Bunch' with James
Joyce's printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon in 1922, he founded the
Contact Publishing Company in 1923 using his father-in-law's money.
Lasting until 1929, Contact Editions brought out books by Bryher ('Two
Selves'), H. D.'s 'Palimpsest', Mina Loy's 'Lunar Baedeker', Ernest
Hemingway's first book 'Three Stories & Ten Poems' (1923), poems
by Marsden Hartley, William Carlos Williams ('Spring and All', 1923),
Emanuel Carnevali's only book during his lifetime ('The Hurried Man'),
prose by Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein ('The Making of Americans',
1925), Mary Butts ('Ashe of Rings'), John Herrmann ('What Happens'),
Edwin Lanham ('Sailors Don't Care'), Robert Coates ('The Eater of
Darkness'), Texas schoolteacher Gertrude Beasley's 'My First Thirty
Years' and Saikaku Ihara's 'Quaint Tales of Samurais'. McAlmon paid
for the publication of 'The Ladies Almanack' by Djuna Barnes.

One of McAlmon's most important and best-received works is 'Village:
As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period' (1924) which presents a
bleak portrait of an American town. The book shows his love for Eugene
Vidal (Eugene Collins in the book), Gore Vidal's father, with whom he
grew up in Madison, South Dakota, which is documented in Gore Vidal's
mid-90s memoir, 'Palimpsest.'

Other works include the short story collection 'A Companion Volume'
(1923), the autobiographical novel 'Post-Adolescence' (1923),
'Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales)' (1925), the poetry collections
'The Portrait of a Generation' (1926), and 'Not Alone Lost' (1937),
the 1,200 line epic poem 'North America, Continent of Conjecture'
(1929), and his memoir 'Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography'
(1938).

McAlmon returned to the United States in 1940, residing in El Paso,
Texas, where he sought treatment for a pulmonary ailment. He died at
Desert Hot Springs, California, almost unknown in his native country,
sixteen years later.

In the 1990s, Edward Lorusso brought out three volumes of McAlmon's
fiction (many were first American publications), 'Village' (1924,
1990), 'Post-Adolescence' (1923, 1991), and 'Miss Knight and Others'
(1992), all through University of New Mexico Press. Edward Lorusso
also published 'Naked Truth: The Fiction of Robert McAlmon' in 2020.

McAlmon is heavily featured in the book 'Memoirs of Montparnasse' by
John Glassco about the golden age of Paris in the 1920s when writers
and artists flocked to the city.

His social circle and friendship with Ernest Hemingway are discussed
in the novel 'The Paris Wife' by Paula McLain.

In 2007, his fictionalized memoir 'The Nightinghouls of Paris' was
published, based on the experiences of Glassco and his friend Graeme
Taylor with McAlmon in Paris. The previously unpublished book was
based on a typescript held by Yale's archives.

An epistolary novel about McAlmon's life in Greenwich Village, his
expatriate adventures in Paris, and final years in California,
'Letters from Oblivion' was published by Edward Lorusso in 2014.


Fiction
=========
* 'A Hasty Bunch'. n.p., n.d. Printed by Maurice Darantière in Lyon in
1922. Short stories
* 'A Companion Volume'. Contact, Paris 1923. Short stories
* 'Post-Adolescence'. Contact, Paris 1923. Short stories
* 'Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period'. Contact,
Paris 1924. Novel
* 'Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales' Contact, Paris 1925
[Photo-reprinted as 'There Was a Rustle of Black Silk Stockings'.
1963]
* 'The Infinite Huntress and Other Stories'. Black Sun Press, Paris
1932
* 'A Scarlet Pansy' (under pseudonym Robert Scully), William Farro,
Inc. (Roth), 1933
* Robert E. Knoll: 'McAlmon and the Lost Generation. A Self Portrait'.
University of Nebraska, Lincoln 1962.
* 'Miss Knight and Others'. University of New Mexico Press, 1992
* 'The Nightinghouls of Paris'. University of Illinois Press, 2007
*  "La nuit pour adresse". Maud Simonnot (Paris: Editions Gallimard,
2017)


Memoirs
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* 'Being Geniuses Together'. Secker & Warburg, London 1938. Memoir
* 'Being Geniuses Together'. Doubleday, New York 1968 (revised with
supplementary chapters by Kay Boyle)


Poetry
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* 'Explorations'. Egoist Press, London 1921.
* 'The Portrait of a Generation'. Contact, Paris 1925.
* 'North America, Continent of Conjecture'. Contact, Paris 1929.
* 'Not Alone Lost'. New Directions Publishing, Norfolk, CT, 1937.


                               Legacy
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William Saroyan wrote a short story about McAlmon in his 1971 book,
'Letters from 74 rue Taitbout or Don't Go But If You Must Say Hello To
Everybody'.

Charles Demuth painted a watercolor based on McAlmon's 'Distinguished
Air: Grim Fairy Tales' titled 'Distinguished Air.'


                             References
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*
*  The only biography of the author.
*  Contains an insightful account of McAlmon's life.
*


                           External links
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*
* Robert McAlmon Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
*


License
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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McAlmon