The Four Seas Company was a bookstore and small-press publisher in Boston, Massachusetts. [1] It is remembered today mostly for its publication of the early work of major modernist writers such as William Faulkner, [2] William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, [3] and Yone Noguchi. Four Seas was founded by the young Edmund R. Brown upon his graduation from Harvard College in 1910, [4] and its imprint first appears in 1911. The last book published under the imprint was in 1930, the year the company was absorbed by Bruce Humphries, Inc. [4] [5]
William Carlos Williams was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism.
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
Sylvia Beach, born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was an American-born bookseller and publisher who lived most of her life in Paris, where she was one of the leading expatriate figures between World War I and II.
Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public artworks, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
Lewis Barrett Welch Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation literary movement.
Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American author, poet and publisher. In the 1920s, he founded in Paris the publishing house, Contact Editions, where he published such writers as Ernest Hemmingway and Gertrude Stein.
James Laughlin was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishing.
Margaret Caroline Anderson was the American founder, editor and publisher of the art and literary magazine The Little Review, which published a collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. The periodical is most noted for introducing many prominent American and British writers of the 20th century, such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the United States, and publishing the first thirteen chapters of James Joyce's then-unpublished novel, Ulysses.
Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century.
Charles Warren Stoddard was an American author and editor best known for his travel books about Polynesian life.
Yonejirō Noguchi was an influential Japanese writer of poetry, fiction, essays and literary criticism in both English and Japanese. He is known in the west as Yone Noguchi. He was the father of noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
Little, Brown and Company is an American publisher founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and his partner, James Brown, and for close to two centuries has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily Dickinson's poetry and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. As of 2006, Little, Brown and Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Léonie Gilmour was an American educator, editor and journalist. She was the lover and editor of the writer Yone Noguchi and the mother of sculptor Isamu Noguchi and dancer Ailes Gilmour. She is the subject of the feature film Leonie (2010) and the book Leonie Gilmour: When East Weds West (2013).
Gertrude Sanborn was an American journalist, short story writer, and novelist.
Contempo, A Review of Books and Personalities, was a "literary and social commentary" published by Milton A. Abernethy and Anthony Buttitta at Chapel Hill, North Carolina from 1931 to 1934. Though less well-known than some of its contemporaries, Contempo fits into the tradition of the "Little Magazine," a group of elite literary magazines pervasive in the first decades of the twentieth century.
James Robert Mellow was an American art critic and biographer. After starting his art career in the mid 1950s, Mellow primarily worked in editorial positions for Arts Magazine and Industrial Design during the 1960s. As an art critic from the mid 1960s to mid 1970s, Mellow worked for The New Leader, Art International, and The New York Times. Apart from art, Mellow became a biographer in 1974 when he released a biography on Gertrude Stein.
Bertram Dobell was an English bookseller, literary scholar, editor, poet, essayist and publisher.
Shakespeare and Company was an influential English-language bookstore in Paris founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919; Beach published James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses at the bookstore. The store closed in 1941.