One of the dominant figures of twentieth-century American literature, Ezra Weston Loomis Pound spent nearly the entirety of his controversial career in exile. Following in the footsteps of Henry James and Whistler, he left America in 1908 to make his literary reputation in London. Leader of the Imagist school and participant in the Vorticist movement, Pound moved to Paris in early 1921, where, for the next three years, he played a prominent role as champion of Joyce and Eliot, editor of little magazines, and mentor to young American expatriates. After leaving Paris in late 1924, Pound settled in Rapallo, Italy, to devote himself to his experimental epic, The Cantos. Written over the course of almost half a century, this unfinished "poem including history" has remained one of the most significant and most influential achievements of American literature in this century. During his long years in Italy, Pound became increasingly absorbed in political and economic theory and, optimistically convinced that Mussolini's policies presented an enlightened alternative to modern monopoly capitalism, Pound became an apologist for what he misguidedly construed as Fascist economics.
