God will forgive everybody — even Robert McAlmon. F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1923 Robert McAlmon published Ernest Hemingway’s first book. By 1925 he had published — some of them for the first time — Ford Madox Ford, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Norman Douglas, Djuna Barnes, Havelock Ellis, Edith Sitwell, William Carlos Williams, H.D., James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Gould, Marianne Moore, Marsden Hartley, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Burke, Glenway Wescott, and Kay Boyle. “There have been few people, not excepting Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound,” Dan Pinck wrote in the New Republic in 1958, “whose efforts so helped to cast significant literary reputations.”

John Walsh, in his 2005 obituary of the biographer Humphrey Carpenter in the Independent, said: “It is hard to read about life in ‘the Quarter’, as they all called Montparnasse, without wishing to have tasted it oneself — to have bumped into Ernest Hemingway in a bar, to have drunk away the night with Robert McAlmon, to have been caught up in the intrigues of the expatriates and participated in their long fiesta.”

Who wouldn’t want to party with McAlmon in the days when there was a mad urge to over-indulge between wars, as though the lives of those who belonged to what is incorrectly termed “Une Generation Perdue” depended on it? Time grows like poison ivy over the memory of people who seemed so alive during their own lifetime that you would expect them to be immortal. But just as the matter and particles of a person cannot be obliterated by death, something of the energy of a person can continue to resonate long after they are dead. So it is with McAlmon who — although his work has not endured like that of his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald — deserves to be remembered; by writers, if not by everyone. Here are some of the reasons why.