Short and Sweet

I know that I said I wanted plot, but instead I read through a slender 1940s volume called And the Greeks. Its subtitle is A Book of Hellenic Recipes and Culinary Lore Collected, Edited and Arranged by Allan Ross MacDougall, author of The Gourmet's Almanac.


MacDougall was a friend of Edna St. Vincent Millay (her biographer and letters editor), Isadora Duncan (her manager, correspondent, and biographer), Kay Boyle (correspondent), Djuna Barnes (correspondent), William Carlos Williams: lots of the folks I studied for my MA thesis. It seems as though he was an activist for women's suffrage in England: he must be the student mentioned here in a 1912 news article.


Here's a blurb about MacDougall from the New York Public Library's dance collection:


Allan Ross Macdougall, an American writer born in 1893 [and died in 1956--took me a while to find that date!], lived and worked in Paris in the 1920's His subjects were wide in range, from the performing arts to the decorative arts for the periodical Arts and Decoration, and sometimes perfume and make-up for the magazines Charm and Beauty. A member of Isadora Duncan's circle, he wrote an essay entitled “Isadora: an essay in the biography of an American dancer” which was eventually published in 1960 as Isadora; a revolutionary in art and love. With Irma Duncan, he co-wrote a partial biography of Isadora Duncan entitled Isadora Duncan's life in Soviet Russia and her last years, published in 1929.