SOURCE: An afterword to A Hasty Bunch, by Robert McAlmon, Southern Illinois University Press, 1977, pp. 287-299.

In the following excerpted afterword to a reissue of McAlmon's, A Hasty Bunch Boyle asserts that McAlmon's best short stories were “A Boy's Discovery” and “A Vacation's Job,” while believing that many of his other stories were insufficiently developed.

In his perceptive book McAlmon and The Lost Generation,¹ Robert E. Knoll makes the challenging statement that McAlmon's writing friends of the twenties and thirties may have come to glimpse “their youthful selves in McAlmon [and thus] retrospectively endow him with greater potentialities and make greater claims for his work than his achievement can sustain.” The truth is that both in his work and in his life Robert McAlmon was completely unlike any of us who knew him well, and equally unlike anyone we had known before or were later to know. William...