Although as editor, polemicist, and Scot-language poet MacDiarmid was the dominant presence in the early years of the revival movement, he was not the first of the new Scottish writers to engage publicly with the condition of modernity. In 1918, the Orkney-born Edwin Muir published (under the pseudonym of Edward Moore) We Moderns: a collection of what he called ‘aphorisms’, dedicated to A. R. Orage. These were short, polemical, ‘manifesto-like’ essays, and had originally appeared as a series in Orage's New Age to which Muir was a regular contributor. The success of the book in Britain and America resulted in Muir obtaining a contract with the American Freeman magazine which enabled him and his wife Willa to travel in Europe between 1921 and 1924, thus gaining first-hand knowledge of a cultural influence known previously only through print media, and especially through the articles published in the New Age. The Muirs' sojourn in Prague and Dresden also led to their acquiring the facility in German which later led to their translations of modernist writers such as Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch.