Emily Holmes Coleman, society editor of the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune ), was part of the group of writers who contributed to transition magazine, edited by two of her fellow Tribune staff members, Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul. A native of Oakland, California, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1920 and married Loyd Ring Coleman, a psychologist, in 1921. She arrived in Paris with her young son John in 1926.

Coleman's interest in the instinctive and the subconscious is in keeping with transition's call for a "revolution of the word" and a renewal of language's roots in the depths of the collective unconscious. As she says in her response to the transition questionaire, "Why Do Americans Live In Europe"" (Fall 1928): "Great art in the past has existed only when a medium was being struggled with; great literature has come generally in the early development of a...