Harold Albert Loeb, now best-known as the prototype for the character Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), was recognized in his time for his talents as a writer and editor. The founder and chief editor of Broom, one of the earliest English-language reviews of the arts on the European continent between the two World Wars, he also had three novels published during the twenties.

Loeb was the descendant of two notable New York City families: the wealthy Guggenheims on his mother's side and the Loebs of Kuhn-Loeb and Company, investment bankers, on his father's. After receiving a Bachelor of Literature degree from Princeton University in 1913, Loeb went to Alberta, Canada, and settled in Empress, a new divisional point on the Canadian Pacific Railroad line, where, among other things, he went into the business of laying concrete foundations and may also have been involved in cattle...