Arthur Moss was among the early American expatriates in Paris and a lively participant in Left Bank social and literary activity. With Florence Gilliam, Moss founded and edited Gargoyle, the first English-language review of arts and letters on the Continent. He also did free-lance writing and later edited Erskine Gwynne's Boulevardier. Moss's friends in Paris included Malcolm Cowley, Robert Coates, Ernest Hemingway, Robert McAlmon, Harold Stearns, Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Claude McKay, Ludwig Lewisohn, James Thurber, Elliot Paul, Harold Loeb, and Kitty Cannell.

Moss was born in Greenwich Village to a Turkish mother and a German-Jewish father, who determined that the family should become completely Americanized. After leaving Cornell without a degree and working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York, Moss edited the Greenwich Village magazine the Quill. According to Gilliam, who was married to Moss for several years, "aside from romantic attachments (he was married...