James Oppenheim's literary works are no longer widely studied, though some of his fiction occasionally appears in anthologies such as Daniel Walden's On Being Jewish (1974), which includes a portion of Oppenheim's Doctor Rast in the section entitled "The Immigrant Experience." Oppenheim himself described his stories as "bad prose with a streak of poetry in them," but with the possible exception of "The Slave," even his poetry, of which several volumes were published during his lifetime, is largely unread today, as are all of his self-help books, strongly influenced by Jungian theories and written for a popular audience. Although Robert E. Spiller calls him "an important member of the [Imagist] movement," Oppenheim will probably be longest remembered as the ambitious and controversial editor of the short-lived and ill-fated Seven Arts, a periodical which became one of the most important and influential voices of the World War I period.

Born...