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The Formidable Miss Barnes: Life of Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was one of the great writing talents of the Lost Generation years, the years of World War I in New York and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.
Coming from a bizarre home life, she built her skills as a newspaper and magazine journalist in New York during the years of World War I. A true Bohemian, she had affairs with men, often long lasting, and women, often of shorter duration, during the New York Years. These were the years of her education.
In Paris of the 1920s, she propelled herself forward as possibly the best woman writer working in the Left Bank, a standout in the early years of the New Yorker magazine, and as the lover and breadwinner with her great love, the silverpoint artist Thelma Wood. That relationship disintegrated in 1928 as a result of Thelma's many infidelities, and Djuna more or less drifted into Peggy Guggenheim's circle in the early 1930s while engaging in a variety of known affairs with men. Her great Modernist novel "Nightwood" was completed in these years, a novel considered by many to be second only to James Joyce's "Ulysses" in the Modernist canon. She was also a central figure among the women of the Left Bank of the 1920s, a remarkably talented and independent cohort of women that has never ever really been equaled.
Later in the 1930s, drying out from alcoholism, she returned to New York and lived a semi-reclusive life in Greenwich Village and produced some additional great work including a play supported by UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskoljd.
One of the most fascinating and talented personalities of her time, a person whose talents and personality probably awaits still yet another biographer to get a focus on this remarkable women. So a definitive biography on Djuna Barnes continues to be a distant objective, this book part of the work in progress.
This biography is a solid downpayment on what will be an effort of at least two centuries. (Paul Myers)
Coming from a bizarre home life, she built her skills as a newspaper and magazine journalist in New York during the years of World War I. A true Bohemian, she had affairs with men, often long lasting, and women, often of shorter duration, during the New York Years. These were the years of her education.
In Paris of the 1920s, she propelled herself forward as possibly the best woman writer working in the Left Bank, a standout in the early years of the New Yorker magazine, and as the lover and breadwinner with her great love, the silverpoint artist Thelma Wood. That relationship disintegrated in 1928 as a result of Thelma's many infidelities, and Djuna more or less drifted into Peggy Guggenheim's circle in the early 1930s while engaging in a variety of known affairs with men. Her great Modernist novel "Nightwood" was completed in these years, a novel considered by many to be second only to James Joyce's "Ulysses" in the Modernist canon. She was also a central figure among the women of the Left Bank of the 1920s, a remarkably talented and independent cohort of women that has never ever really been equaled.
Later in the 1930s, drying out from alcoholism, she returned to New York and lived a semi-reclusive life in Greenwich Village and produced some additional great work including a play supported by UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskoljd.
One of the most fascinating and talented personalities of her time, a person whose talents and personality probably awaits still yet another biographer to get a focus on this remarkable women. So a definitive biography on Djuna Barnes continues to be a distant objective, this book part of the work in progress.
This biography is a solid downpayment on what will be an effort of at least two centuries. (Paul Myers)
224 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1983
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