Old Time Stories : A Modernist Classic of Native California

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.