SOURCE: “McAlmon's Books,” in Robert McAlmon: Expatriate and Writer, University of Nebraska Studies, 1957, pp. 39-80.

In the following excerpt from his Robert McAlmon: Expatriate Publisher and Writer, Knoll discusses McAlmon's fiction and poetry as unpolished and energetic.

McAlmon's critical assumptions were in several respects those of his time. He and his contemporaries in the Twenties were concerned that “art” not get between them and their reactions to the world they lived in. They thought that conventional language—the language of the genteel tradition—too frequently dictated what the writer could say about experience, and it dictated often what the nature of the experience itself could be. To liberate themselves from what they thought was a dead tradition, they went into exile.

Ezra Pound had anticipated them. Rejecting the essentially verbal quality of late Victorian poetry, he and the Imagists in London had attempted to free the writer from...