For ten years, Eugene Jolas, poet and writer, was the editor of transition, one of the most important literary journals to appear in Paris during the twenties and thirties. Best known for its publication of segments from James Joyce's Work in Progress, transition also encouraged and published experimental writing of the period by such writers as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett. Even though Jolas originally coedited transition with Elliot Paul, it was most definitely his journal. Throughout the twenty-seven issues appearing from 1927 to 1939, Jolas developed a philosophy which stressed the unconscious as the source of literary creation and the need for a new language with which that creation might be expressed. Totally convinced that the poet's tapping of the unconscious resulted in a vision that transcended the sterile, mechanical world of the twentieth century, he opened the pages of transition to an...