Robert McAlmon Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jack Byrne

Critical Essay by Jack Byrne

SOURCE: A review of “Miss Knight and Others,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 263-64.

In the following review of a reissue of McAlmon's Miss Knight and Others, Byrne identifies McAlmon as a groundbreaking author ahead of his time.

Ezra Pound gave us the definitive “haiku” to express just the right rage in response to the Great War: “There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization.” Not the Roaring Twenties nor the Jazz Age nor the Lost Generation characterizes so well the Weimar Republic, and especially Berlin, following “the war to end all wars.” Brecht, in The Threepenny Opera, Pabst's “Pandora's Box,” even the German “street films,” all made attempts to dramatize the obvious decadence that George Grosz caricatures in his irreverent lithographs. Perhaps the subject...
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