Eugene Jolas

Editor and poet. Born in the United States, Jolas was raised in France and Germany, returned to the States to work as a newspaper journalist, and moved to Paris in the 1920s, where he met JJ in 1924. The literary review that Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald (they married in 1926) founded in Paris, transition, became a voice for avant-garde writing in the 1920s and 1930s and was a venue for serial appearances of JJ's "Work in Progress". Not only an articulate advocate for JJ's writing, Jolas responded to a challenge by JJ with correctly guessing the title of the forthcoming Finnegans Wake. Jolas's posthumous autobiography, Man from Babel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), is a vivid portrait of literary Paris between the wars and of his friendship with JJ. William Brockman