John Herrmann
John Herrmann was an American author born in 1900 in Lansing, Michigan, who later became a notable figure in the expatriate literary community of the 1920s. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he initially worked as a salesman before pursuing art history in Germany. His move to Paris introduced him to influential writers like Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway, and he eventually married fellow writer Josephine Herbst. Herrmann's first novel, "What Happens," published in 1926, faced censorship in the U.S. for its bold content but gained recognition abroad. Throughout his career, he contributed to various literary magazines and explored themes related to the working class, particularly during the Great Depression, leading to his involvement in the Communist Party. His works, including "The Summer Is Ended" and "The Salesman," critiqued middle-class American life and the impact of capitalism. In 1940, as scrutiny from the FBI over his political affiliations grew, he relocated to Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1959. Herrmann's literary contributions continue to be recognized for their social commentary and stylistic experimentation.
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Subject Terms
John Herrmann
Writer
- Born: November 9, 1900
- Birthplace: Lansing, Michigan
- Died: April 9, 1959
- Place of death: Guadalajara, Mexico
Biography
Born in 1900 in Lansing, Michigan, John Herrmann graduated from the University of Michigan. After briefly working as a salesman, he moved to post-World War IGermany to attend the University of Munich to study art history. By 1924, however, he had joined the expatriate community of writers and artists in Paris, where he made the acquaintance of such luminaries as writers Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Most significantly, he met the writers Josephine Herbst and Robert McAlmon; the former would become his first wife while the latter would first publish a prose excerpt of Herrmann’s in the 1925 anthology The Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers.
Returning to New York, Herrmann and Herbst were married in 1926 and relocated to Bucks County where they could live cheaply and write while Herrmann paid the bills working as a publisher’s sales representative. Later that year, McAlmon’s Contact Editions Press also published Herrmann’s first novel, What Happens, a straightforward autobiographical novel with a simple, assertive style that displayed the influences of Herrmann’s contemporary and friend Hemingway. What Happens was initially banned for publication in the United States (presumably transgressing the strict obscenity standards of the day), but became well known among those critics and readers with access to European publishers.
Herrmann continued to publish in various literary magazines like This Quarter, and many of his shorter works revealed his willingness to experiment stylistically. As the United States entered the Depression, Herrmann became more and more interested in the plight of the working class, and soon he had become involved in the Communist Party. His novel The Summer Is Ended (1932) pierced the pretensions of the American middle class, just as his 1939 novel, The Salesman, revealed the loss of identity suffered by the American working man caught up in a whirlwind of bureaucracy and unfeeling capitalism.
Herrmann moved with his second wife to Mexico in 1940 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to investigate his involvement with communism, effectively severing his ties within the publishing world. He remained in Mexico until his death in Guadalajara in 1959.