Contact

Contact, literary magazine founded in 1920 by American authors Robert McAlmon and William Carlos Williams. Devoted to avant-garde writing of the period, it led to McAlmon’s important Contact book-publishing enterprise.

Contact began as a mimeographed magazine in New York and relocated in Paris in 1921 following McAlmon’s marriage to English author Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman). It published four issues in 1920–21 and a fifth in 1923 and included writers such as its editors, Kay Boyle, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Glenway Wescott; the magazine was then abandoned.

Meanwhile, McAlmon published his short-story collection A Hasty Bunch himself in 1922. That, his contacts with fellow expatriate writers in Paris, and a large gift of money from his father-in-law, a shipping tycoon, led to McAlmon’s Contact Editions books, which began to appear in 1923. These included works by himself and Bryher; Williams’s Spring and All; Ernest Hemingway’s first two books; The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein; and the anthology Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers, which included works by James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford, among others. Nathanael West’s novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was the last Contact Publishing Company book. Williams and West revived Contact magazine briefly in the U.S. in 1931–33, publishing new stories by McAlmon, among other of the original Contact writers.