Manuel Komroff was already established as a writer when he arrived in Paris in 1926. The Grace of Lambs, a collection of short stories, had been published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, where Komroff was working as manufacturing manager and as an editor for the Modern Library series. He had also contributed a humorous short story, "A Union of Beggars," to the first issue of Harold Loeb's Rome-based little magazine, Broom (November 1921), and through his New York literary associations he had met many of the American writers he would see again in France. Komroff was born in New York City to businessman Samuel Komroff and Belle Komroff. In 1912 he left his engineering studies at Yale without a degree and became an art critic for the New York Call; he also wrote motion-picture scores during this period. Socialist sympathies led Komroff to Russia,probably sometime in 1917, where he became editor in...