Bravig Imbs

Biography

Bravig Imbs was born in 1904 in Milwaukee to Norwegian-American parents. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he worked as a newspaper reporter, and music critic and, according to some, a proofreader for the 'International Edition of the Chicago Tribune in Paris.

In Paris he befriended George Antheil, Pavel Tchelitchew, René Crevel, Georges Maratier, and later Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. In 1931, his wife Valeska gave birth to a child, and Gertrude Stein ended their friendship because of her aversion to childbirth.

He wrote novels, poems and a memoir, and played the harpsichord. He translated some poems by Georges Hugnet. He also co-wrote books with Bernard Fay and André Breton. He chronicled his life in Paris in the 1920s in his Confessions of Another Young Man, published in 1936.

In 1944, he worked as a radio announcer, under the pseudonym of 'Monsieur Bobby'. He worked for the US State Department as a radio announcer for the O.I.C. in France after the war. He died there in a jeep accident travelling on official business near Grenoble, on May 29, 1946, and was interred in a US military cemetery in Luynes, France.