Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930

This collaboration--posthumous in McAlmon's case--has proved amazingly successful. It gives us pictures of two lives--and many surrounding lives--from different angles, as if they had been taken with a stereoscopic camera. Thereby it gives us an impression of depth and substantiality that have been lacking in other memoirs of Paris in the 1920's. -- Malcolm Cowley, New York Times Book Review

There was no more exhilarating decade in the history of modern letters than the twenties in Paris. They were all there: Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Gertude Stein, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Alice B. Toklas... and with them were Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle.

Their collaborative memoir began as a book written by McAlmon in 1934. In the late 1960s, Kay Boyle revised and edited the book, adding alternating chapters of her own. The result is a marvelous chronicle of the period as seen through two sets of perceptive eyes. As both writers tell wonderful anecdotes--of Joyce on his evening binges, of Stein holding court, of Hemingway at his most vicious--they beautifully evoke 1920s Paris in this sad, funny, informative, and nostalgic memoir.

On his side of the dual autobiography (an interesting device which works very well here) McAlmon tells fascinating stories... and he is always honestly direct. You like the man and you like the book... On the other side, Kay Boyle is a delightful writer with a style that can be dazzling, yet strong as steel... It is Miss Boyle who gives us the airy magic of Camelot-Paris simply by telling us the story of her hopelessly romantic life. -- Mario Puzo