Old Time Stories

Dismantled and scattered just before his death, Jaime de Angulo’s poetic masterpiece Old Time Stories is now reconstituted for the first time in this edition.

Jaime de Angulo’s Old Time Stories, a visual prose-poem drawing on his anthropological research among Indigenous communities in California, is a forgotten modernist treasure. Completed shortly before de Angulo’s death, the work has survived only in fragments, divided between an abridged 1953 publication and a limited edition from the 1970s. This new reconstituted edition gives contemporary readers—whether interested in experimental literature, linguistics, cultural anthropology, or Native American history—their first chance to engage with the complete work.

Structured around children’s stories inspired by the Indigenous tales and legends de Angulo encountered directly during his studies, Old Time Stories uses illustrations, different typefaces, and other experimental formatting techniques to translate rich oral and pictographic traditions into the condensed form of print. Beyond its significance as an innovative work of American literary modernism, it interrogates the colonialist foundations of Western modernity through this very reworking of Western literary conventions.

Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) was a linguist, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, novelist, and poet. Born in France of Spanish parents, he came to the US in 1905 and worked odd jobs, including as a cowboy, before pursuing medical studies. Beginning in 1914, he spent time with California’s Pit River Tribe. A gifted linguist, de Angulo learned several Native American languages and, in the 1920s, affiliated with the anthropology department of the University of California, Berkeley. In the late 1920s, he began turning his attention to more literary writing. De Angulo’s many books include The Lariat, Indians in Overalls, Indian Tales, Jaime in Taos: The Taos Papers of Jaime de Angulo, and Home Among the Swinging Stars: Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo. Jerome McGann is Emeritus University Professor at the University of Virginia and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent books are Transubstantiations: Poetry and Verse; Byron and the Poetics of Adversity; and Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.