The Press: Zululand

Of the seaweed deposited in Europe by the high tide of U. S. tourism during the 1920's, the lunatic fringe was the Paris group that published the magazine, transition. Passionate toadies to European culture, Editors Eugene Jolas and Elliot Harold Paul printed in 1927 the first fragments of great James Joyce's work in gibberish, provisionally titled Work in Progress, transition writers, uncertain of society's appreciation of their real personalities, thereupon took over Joyce's experimental style to conceal murky thinking behind an inscrutable jabberwocky.

With Depression, literary expatriates began pouring home to the...