John Cournos became a novelist of some importance following the publication of The Mask (1919). All of his seven novels--the last of which was The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932)--were warmly received in the press and all had a succès d'estime; but they lost money. Cournos wrote only one book of poetry, In Exile (1923), and a prose poem that he wrote was included in Ezra Pound's anthology Des Imagistes (1914). Though most of the imagists were his good friends, his work was not included in subsequent anthologies of imagist poetry until Richard Aldington included two of his prose poems, "Shylock's Choice," and "God's Face," in Imagist Anthology 1930. Cournos also contributed poems, book reviews, articles on art (especially American art), and translations from twentieth-century Russian literature to little magazines. During the 1920s he became well known in England and a little less so in the United States.

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