This biographical entry of Ezra Pound in The Readers Companion to American History describes Pound as a "catalyst for all serious artists" fighting to make their work new and describes how his work affected unknowable changes.

Until age twenty-two Pound lived and attended schools in New York and Pennsylvania. In 1901 at the University of Pennsylvania he began a lifelong friendship with William Carlos Williams. He transferred to Hamilton where in 1905 he received a Ph.B.—a degree the school invented for him (and never offered before or since) to fit the assortment of courses he insisted on taking. He then returned to Penn. Money problems in 1907 forced him to take a job at Wabash College, Indiana, but after four months he was fired for being "a Latin Quarter type." The next year he went by cattle boat to Spain, crossed to Venice, stayed for three months, and...