LM281 Left Bank Lit: Being Geniuses Together, by Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle

  • 28 Mar 2026
  • 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Impact Café, 67 rue Beaubourg, 75003
  • 3

Registration

  • Theodor Cozart-Madsen
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Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together is one of the most candid insider accounts of the expatriate world that flourished in 1920s Paris. McAlmon—writer, publisher, and close friend to Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, and Pound—spent a decade at the center of the Left Bank’s literary ferment. Originally published in 1938 and later expanded by Kay Boyle, the book blends memoir, sketches, and portraits of the extraordinary constellation of artists who defined the modernist era. McAlmon’s voice is wry, weary, and unsentimental; he strips away the mythic glow surrounding the “Lost Generation,” revealing instead a community of ambitious, restless, and often self-destructive creators. His accounts of evenings at cafés, of failed manuscripts and fragile friendships, convey both the freedom and the futility that shadowed those years. Where Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast celebrates the memory of Paris and Barnes’s Nightwood transforms it into dream, McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together records it as lived experience—vivid, cynical, and unvarnished. The result is a rare, firsthand chronicle of a moment when the boundaries between art and life blurred in the smoky rooms and long nights of the Left Bank.

Due to the length of the book, we will be focusing on the following chapters, which relate to the other readings we are doing in this series:

  • McAlmon 1920-1921 (Ch. 1)
  • Boyle 1922-1923 (Ch. 2)
  • Boyle 1923 (Ch. 4)
  • McAlmon 1922-1923 (Ch. 9)
  • Boyle 1926-1928 (Ch. 16)
  • McAlmon 1924-1925 (Ch. 17)
  • McAlmon 1925-1926 (Ch. 19)
  • Boyle 1928-1930 (Ch. 26)

Note: This book is mildly challenging to find. We have a PDF version that is available at this link:

Being Geniuses Together

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 21 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

The book group meets in the downstairs of the Impact Café.

Registration for the March meeting opens on Sunday, 01 March.


Good to know: 

  • WICE members can register for this event online using WICE's fast and secure online system. Simply click on the link and follow directions.

  • Not a member? You may be able to join some events as a nonmember for a small fee which includes a 3-month membership. Please send an email to wice@wice-paris.org if you have questions. We look forward to talking with you.