The nightinghouls of Paris /

Kansas-born expatriate Robert McAlmon (1895-1956) was founder of the publishing house Contact Editions and author of Being Geniuses Together (1938; rev. ed., 1968). McAlmon moved to Paris in 1921 and this fictionalized memoir is based on his life in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s. McAlmon wrote the memoir in the late 1940s, but the manuscript remained unpublished until Smoller (Florida International Univ.; author of the first biography of McAlmon, Adrift among Geniuses, CH, Jun'75) extricated it from Yale University's Beinecke collection and prepared it for publication. The memoir begins in 1928 and includes such figures as William Bird, Kay Boyle, John Glassco, Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, Ernest Hemingway, and Peggy Guggenheim. All the Anglo-American writers have pseudonyms, revealed by Smoller in his 45-page introduction, annotated notes, and seven-page "roster." Without the roster of actual names, the "novel" would lack some of its historical color and importance. Smoller admits to the memoir's "lack of imagination," but believes it "accurately records expatriate life" in the "somber" late 1920s. Though it lacks an index, the book will be valuable for the rich introduction, which brings one up to date on writers' squabbles, their conflicting memoirs, and recent biographies and scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-upper-division undergraduates; graduate students. N. R. Fitch University of Southern California