Grounded in biographical research and drawing on archival sources, this essay examines how the influential paradigm of literary modernism and the expatriate 1920s that was established by Malcolm Cowley in his Exile’s Return (1934; 1951)—and, concomitantly, his parsimonious appraisal of Robert McAlmon—was contested by his literary coevals Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Glassco. The appearance of Boyle’s and McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together (1968) and Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) triggered altercations in print and private correspondence which, centered on the figure and function of Robert McAlmon, challenged premises and assumptions—of politics and geography, of gender and sexuality—in Cowley’s narrative that made his claim of representativeness disputable. The essay also considers how the contestations of the 1920s by Cowley, Boyle, Porter, Glassco and McAlmon conjointly anticipated the large-scale revision of (the canon of) “high” modernism that was propelled by the rise of postmodernist theory and feminist revisionism in the 1980s, and how more recent scholarship, including insights from sexuality and queer studies, may help us come to a literary re-appraisal of Robert McAlmon. It shows how, even when the decade was still within human memory, “writing the 1920s” was a complicated, contested and contradictory enterprise, fraught with dissent and distortion, fabulation, manipulation and revision—a dynamics of historiography that may likewise make “writing the new Twenties” a highly tenuous, provisional and indeterminate enterprise that will be subject to ongoing contestation and adjustment, revision and subversion.