Alfred Kreymborg was born in 1883 to a German father and an American mother in New York City. Though he did not go on to inherit the family cigar business, he did inherit his father’s prodigious chess skills. Gifted as he was, Kreymborg’s legacy survives not through his chess prowess, but through his work contributing to the launch of modernism and offering a publication platform for Loy’s work as one of the most important figures in the in the history of the little magazine.

As a young man juggling a day job to support nightly artistic pursuits, Kreymborg met Alanson Hartpence, who convinced him to pursue art full time. As Kreymborg fell deeper into the artist world and began frequenting artist hangouts, he met Marsden Hartley who invited him to Alfred Stieglitz’s Round Table. At the Round Table he met Man Ray and Samuel Halpert, with whom he moved to a rural cottage in New Jersey, known as Ridgefield Cottage or the Grantwood Colony, and founded his first little magazine, Glebe.

As the editor of Glebe, Kreymborg expected to be “unhampered in his editorial inclinations” (Allen 419), but Glebe’s wealthy backers, the Boni brothers, had a proclivity for European writers that clashed with Kreymborg’s preference for Americans. When the Bonis became too controlling, Kreymborg resigned, and Glebe could not survive without him.

Undeterred, Kreymborg moved onto his next project the very same month Glebe’s last issue left the presses, when he and Walter Arensberg met at a party hosted by Allan Norton. The little magazine Others was born of this partnership, but, ultimately, the publication was Kreymborg’s, whose determination to keep the magazine humble and unassuming proved irreconcilable with the grandiosity of Arensberg’s ideas. Despite the dissolution of its founding alliance, Others lived on and played an important role both in Kreymborg’s career and in his relationship with Loy. The magazine not only published Loy’s Love Songs, but dedicated a special issue to Loy’s revision, Songs to Joannes. Much of the work that constitutes the collaborative relationship between Loy and Kreymborg was that of an editor and a writer, though at one point Loy even took the reins as a guest editor of Others. The two also collaborated outside of the little magazine sphere; Loy starred in the Provincetown Players’ production of Kreymborg’s Lima Beans, wearing a dress of her own design to boot.

Kreymborg’s work in theater did not stop with this collaboration: he also took a collection of three of his own plays on a national tour, and eventually became a co-director of the One-Act Reparatory Company, which showed on Broadway. In addition to his theatrical exploits and his work on Glebe and Others, Kreymborg edited a third little magazine, The Broom. On top of all that, by the end of his life, Kreymborg had “written forty books; lectured; taught; and served as associate director of the Federal Radio of the W.P.A., president of the Poetry Society of America, and judge of the Pulitzer prize competition” (Churchill 67).

On the whole, Kreymborg was a crucial figure to the historical avant-garde movement. Frank Waldo writes, “He has more claim to be called a founder [of the American Theater] than Eugene O’Neill” (1). As for his little magazines, Charles Allen wrote, “Their significance is no greater or no less than the estimate that one places on the desirability of securing the reputations of such poets as Williams, Moore, and Stevens” (423).

Works Cited

“Alfred Kreymborg is Dead at 82; Poet and Playwright in ‘Village’.” New York Times

(1923-Current File), Aug 15, 1966.   http://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/117695870?accountid=10427.

Allen, Charles. “Glebe and Others.” College English, vol. 5, no. 8,

1944, pp. 418–423. JSTOR, JSTOR www.jstor.org/stable/371453.

Black, Cheryl D. “The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922.” Order No. 9908923

University of Maryland, College Park, 1998. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 19 Sep. 2017.

Churchill, Suzanne M. “Making Space for Others: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine.” Journal of Modern Literature 22.1 (1998): 47-67. ProQuest. Web. 15 Sep. 2017.

By, ALFRED K. “ON A ONE-ACT THEATRE.” New York Times (1923-Current file): 117. Jan 22 1939. ProQuest. Web. 20 Nov. 2017 .

Moore, Marianne. “Letters.” Partisan Review 64, no. 4 (Fall, 1997): 597-608. http://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/237122854?accountid=10427.

SARLOS, ROBERT KAROLY. “THE PROVINCETOWN PLAYERS: EXPERIMENTS IN

STYLE. (VOLUMES I AND II).” Order No. 6605392 Yale University, 1966. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 19 Sep. 2017.

Voyce, S. “‘Make the World Your Salon’: Poetry and Community at the

Arensberg Apartment.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 15 no. 4, 2008, pp. 627-646. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mod.0.0039

Waldo, Frank. “MR KREYMBORG WOOS AMERICA.” The Dial; a Semi – monthly

Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information (1880-1929) 07 1925: 72. ProQuest. Web. 19 Sep. 2017

Other Figures