Harold Loeb

Harold Loeb
Name	Harold Loeb
Birth date	December 17, 1891
Birth place	New York City, New York, United States
Death date	August 19, 1974
Death place	New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Writer, editor, publisher, businessman, lecturer
Nationality	American

Harold Loeb Harold Loeb was an American writer, editor, publisher, and critic associated with the expatriate literary scene in Paris and New York during the early 20th century. He played a formative role in promoting modernist and avant-garde writers through publishing ventures and literary salons while participating in journalism, business, and later academic life. Loeb is remembered for his memoirs, short fiction, and for founding The Sunwise Turn bookshop and imprint which connected figures from the Lost Generation to emerging American modernism.

Early life and education

Loeb was born in New York City into a family tied to Wall Street and finance, and he attended preparatory schools before enrolling at Cornell University, where he encountered contemporaries from the world of letters and arts. At Cornell he interacted with students who would later be associated with institutions such as Princeton University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago literary circles. His early milieu overlapped with families connected to New York Stock Exchange, transatlantic travelers to Paris, and patrons of institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall.

Literary career and The Sunwise Turn

Loeb co-founded The Sunwise Turn, a bookshop and small press in New York City that published poetry, essays, and translations, helping to introduce works by writers associated with Modernism and the Imagists. Through Sunwise he published and promoted authors who later connected to circles around Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, while engaging with printers, typographers, and illustrators linked to J. J. Lankes and other craft practitioners. The bookshop became a salon frequented by figures tied to Harlem Renaissance conversations, Vassar College alumnae, and transatlantic exiles moving between London, Paris, Florence, and Berlin. Loeb edited magazines and published essays, fiction, and translations that intersected with periodicals such as The Dial, The Little Review, and Poetry (magazine). He maintained correspondence with established authors and emerging talents across networks that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H. L. Mencken, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Gerald Brenan, Sylvia Beach, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Arthur Symons, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, and editors at publishing houses such as Viking Press, Alfred A. Knopf, and Scribner's.

Personal life and relationships

Loeb's social circle included patrons, writers, and intellectuals who gathered in salons and bookshops tied to Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and expatriate communities in Paris and Montparnasse. His friendships and rivalries involved personalities like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Van Wyck Brooks, Max Eastman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ford Madox Ford, Djuna Barnes, Lewis Mumford, Sherwood Anderson, James Thurber, Georges Simenon, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, T. E. Hulme, and figures in publishing at Constable & Co., Chatto & Windus, and Farrar & Rinehart. He moved in circles that overlapped with patrons from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, trustees of the New York Public Library, and cultural organizers tied to the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

World War I and journalism

During World War I Loeb worked in roles that brought him into contact with international reporting and wartime journalism, engaging with editors and correspondents linked to newspapers such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, Le Figaro, Le Monde and magazines like Harper's Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. His journalism connected him to the network of foreign correspondents and war chroniclers including figures associated with the Committee on Public Information, relief organizations such as the Red Cross, and expatriate war writers who later became central to accounts of the conflict. Loeb used reportage and memoiristic modes that echoed practices found in reportage by John Reed, Irving Babbitt, Randolph Bourne, and editors of The Masses.

Later life, teaching, and business ventures

After his active publishing years Loeb engaged in business ventures and lecturing that intersected with institutions like Columbia University, Barnard College, Bryn Mawr College, and private clubs in New York City and Boston. He returned intermittently to literary production and criticism, contributing to journals and participating in panels alongside scholars from Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and Rutgers University. Loeb also held positions connected to corporations and family enterprises related to finance in Manhattan and consulted with cultural organizations such as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress, and municipal arts programs in New York City and Boston.

Legacy and critical reception

Critical responses to Loeb's work and influence came from reviewers and historians affiliated with periodicals and presses such as The New Republic, Partisan Review, New Statesman, The Nation, The Saturday Review, The New Yorker, The Spectator, Times Literary Supplement, and academic journals from Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press. Literary historians situate Loeb within discussions of the Lost Generation, the development of American modernism, and the infrastructure of small presses and independent bookselling that supported figures like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos. His memoirs and letters have been consulted by biographers writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and editors of archives at institutions such as the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and university special collections at Yale, Columbia, and Princeton. Contemporary reassessments consider his role in publishing, the conflicts among expatriate writers, and the cultural networks that shaped 20th-century Anglo-American literature.

Category:American writers Category:20th-century American writers Category:American publishers (people)