SOURCE: An introduction to Post-Adolescence: A Selection of Short Fiction, Robert McAlmon, University of New Mexico Press, 1991, pp. xi-xxii.

In the following introduction to a reissue of McAlmon's Post-Adolescence, Lorusso writes that McAlmon's prose contains many flaws, but that several of his stories identify him as a significant American writer.

“If Robert McAlmon had written only ‘A Boy's Discovery’ and ‘A Vacation's Job,’” says Kay Boyle in her afterword to A Hasty Bunch, “he would be more than worth remembering.” The point that Boyle is making is that McAlmon has not been remembered, either by critics or readers.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he could not get an American publisher during the 1920s and 1930s, McAlmon did write more than the above-mentioned short stories; he wrote lots of short stories and novels and poems and essays and memoirs. But during his lifetime (1896-1956), Robert McAlmon...