Contact Editions

Robert Menzies McAlmon (also used Robert M. McAlmon, as his signature name, March 9, 1895 – February 2, 1956) was an American author, poet and publisher.

McAlmon was born in Clifton, Kansas, the youngest of 10 children of an itinerant Presbyterian minister. He died in Desert Hot Springs, California, at the age of 60.

McAlmon was admitted to the University of Minnesota in 1916, but only spent one semester there before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps in 1918. At the conclusion of World War I, he returned to university (1917–1920), this time at the University of Southern California. He attended classes intermittently until 1920, when he moved to Chicago and then New York City, where he worked as a nude model at art school. Once in New York, he collaborated with William Carlos Williams on the Contact Review, which did not last for long, but published poetry by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, H. D., Hilda Doolittle, Kay Boyle and Marsden Hartley. The next year, he moved to Paris after marrying the wealthy and lesbian English writer Annie Winifred Ellerman, better known as Bryher. McAlmon typed and edited the handwritten manuscript of Ulysses by James Joyce, with whom he had a friendship.

McAlmon became a prolific writer after the move, with many of his stories and poems based on his experiences as a youth in South Dakota.

Having published his book of short stories A Hasty Bunch with James Joyce's printer Maurice Darantière in Dijon in 1922, he founded the Contact Publishing Company in 1923 using his father-in-law's money. Lasting until 1929, Contact Editions brought out books by Bryher (Two Selves), H. D.'s Palimpsest, Mina Loy's Lunar Baedecker, Ernest Hemingway's first book Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923), poems by Marsden Hartley, William Carlos Williams (Spring and All, 1923), Emanuel Carnevali's only book during his lifetime (The Hurried Man), prose by Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans, 1925), Mary Butts (Ashe of Rings), John Herrmann (What Happens), Edwin Lanham (Sailors Don't Care), Robert Coates (The Eater of Darkness), Texas schoolteacher Gertrude Beasley's My First Thirty Years and Saikaku Ihara's Quaint Tales of Samurais. McAlmon paid for the publication of The Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes.

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