Although Virgil Geddes was financial editor of the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune ) from 1924 to 1928, he was already a published poet and later became known as a playwright. In Paris he was acquainted with such writers as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Horace Gregory, Padraic Colum, and E. E. Cummings. Among his friends on the staff of the Tribune were Elliot Paul and Eugene Jolas, the founders of transition magazine in 1927, as well as William L. Shirer and James Thurber.

Geddes was born on a farm in Dixon County, Nebraska. Although his formal schooling ended after the eighth grade, he read widely. He served in the United States Navy from 1918 to 1921, first in an officers' training school at Newport, Rhode Island, and then in the Naval Reserve. In the early twenties he held various newspaper and stage jobs in Boston and Chicago. Before...