Mark I. Lurie, “Galantière: The Lost Generation’s Forgotten Man” (Overlook Press, 2018)

New Books in Biography

Though he never enjoyed the publishing success and fame of such friends as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, Lewis Galantière made a considerable contribution to literature over the course of the twentieth century. In Galantière: The Lost Generation’s Forgotten Man (Overlook Press, 2018), Mark I. Lurie describes the life and career of a dedicated man of letters. The precocious son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Galantière’s education was constrained by his family’s impoverished economic circumstances. Yet Galantière benefited from being at the right place at the right time, first in Chicago during the heyday of the “Chicago Renaissance,” then in Paris in the 1920s, where his work as a columnist and translator earned him a place among the expatriate American writers in the city. Returning to America just before the Great Depression, he began a literary partnership with John Houseman that helped start Houseman’s decades-long career in theater. The two reunited during the Second World War at the Office of War Information, for which Galantière organized radio broadcasts into occupied France. Galantière’s work in radio continued during the Cold War as a producer for Radio Free Europe, after which he returned to the literary to become president of American PEN and organize the first PEN International Congress ever held in the United States.

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