BOOKS: The Dreamy Impresario

Lincoln Kirstein's career as a cultural impresario began early, grounded in two attributes rarely found together in the same person: good taste and money. The latter came from his indulgent father, a partner in a Boston department store, and it enabled Kirstein, during his freshman year at Harvard in 1926, to found Hound & Horn, an influential literary quarterly that ran seven years, published original work by the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and lost approximately $8,000 an issue. Somewhat less expensively, Kirstein also began the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, an organization that provided much of the impetus...