This book provides a radical and revisionary account of modernism, its many contradictions, and its troubled place in our public culture. Lawrence Rainey, widely known for his contributions to the debates on modernism, looks beyond the well-examined themes and innovative forms of the movement, asking instead where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences.

Delving into previously unexamined primary materials, the author tells new and startling stories about five major modernist figures - James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., and F. T. Marinetti - whose individual tales offer fresh perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself. The book ranges in time from the formation of Imagism in 1912 to the slow dissolution of modernism during the late 1930s.