John Herrmann, a minor American author and an expatriate in Paris in 1924, was a native of Lansing, Michigan. He graduated from the University of Michigan and worked briefly as a salesman in his home state before going to Germany to study art history at the University of Munich. By 1924, having decided on writing as a career, he had moved to Paris where he mingled with the artists who inhabited the Left Bank, met Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and established friendships with Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Robert McAlmon, and Josephine Herbst, who would become his first wife. While in Paris he became enthusiastic about the experimental prose of Gertrude Stein, but it was Hemingway's early work which seems to have influenced most the tone and style of his fiction.

In 1925 his prose piece "Work in Progress" was included in the anthology Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, edited...