Eugene McCown

At the Central High school of Kansas City, he met Virgil Thomson (the future composer and critic) who was to become a life-long friend.

[5] When he had completed two years of journalism[6] at the University of Missouri, McCown went to New York to paint at the Art Students League and at Woodstock, where he studied with Andrew Dasburg and Eugene Speicher.

[9] There he mingled with the most elegant bohemian crowd, such as André Gide, Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Winnaretta Singer, Isadora Duncan.

He also met with French poet Jean Cocteau, whom, it was rumored, he had an affair with, and British heiress and political activist Nancy Cunard.

Within a week all the paintings and drawings were sold and many reviews in French, American and British newspapers praised his “highly poetic work” as well as "the cleanness of line and the delicacy of detail".

Crevel would distance himself and write a cruel portrait of his former lover in his novel La Mort difficile,[15] where one can easily recognize McCown in Arthur Bruggle.

But now his name was mostly known for the wild parties he gave in his brand-new Art Deco studio designed by André Lurçat (a student of Robert Mallet-Stevens) and his many lovers (including Glenway Wescott, Hart Crane whom he helped get out of prison in July 1929, Raymond Mortimer, Paul Mooney, Richard Wyndham, Patrick Balfour…).

Literally haunted by the memory of his past glory, he only enjoyed the company of former expatriates (Virgil Thomson, Klaus Mann, E. E. Cummings, Mercedes de Acosta, Janet Flanner, Monroe Wheeler, Eugene Berman...).

In 1950, Doubleday published his roman à clef The Siege of Innocence,[18] in which he describes the path of a young American artist of great beauty victim of the concupiscence of his companions.