Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes was born on June 12, 1892, in a log cabin on Storm King Mountain, near Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, and died on June 18, 1982, in her apartment at Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. Over the course of her life she worked as an artist, illustrator, journalist, writer, and Broadway performer and book writer.

Barnes received her early education at home, primarily from her father, Wald Barnes, and her paternal grandmother, Zadel Barnes, a writer, journalist, and Women's Suffrage activist who had previously run an influential literary salon. Their instruction focused on writing, art, and music. After her family faced financial ruin and relocated to New York City in 1912, Barnes studied art formally for the first time, attending the Pratt Institute for approximately six months between 1912 and 1913, and later the Art Students League of New York from 1915 to 1916. Financial pressures led her to leave her studies and take a position as a reporter at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where she declared upon arrival that she could both draw and write. Those words were later inscribed inside the Brooklyn Museum.

Her journalism career expanded rapidly, and by early 1914 her work appeared across the city's major newspapers and periodicals, including the New York Press, The World, and McCall's. She wrote interviews, features, theatre reviews, and news stories, frequently illustrating them herself. She also published short fiction in the New York Morning Telegraph's Sunday supplement and in All-Story Cavalier Weekly. Her reporting often placed her directly inside the subjects she covered: for a 1914 New York World article she submitted to force-feeding, a method then used on hunger-striking suffragists, and she wrote about boxing from ringside, posing the question "What do women want at a fight?" in a 1914 New York World Magazine piece titled "My Sisters and I at a New York Prizefight." In 1915 she interviewed heavyweight champion Jess Willard.

Her connections within Greenwich Village's bohemian community gave Barnes access to avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines, where she published prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays. In 1915 she published The Book of Repulsive Women, an illustrated volume of poetry. Her Broadway career ran from 1920 to 1922 and included appearances in The Dove, The Power of Darkness, and The Tidings Brought to Mary.

In 1921, a commission from McCall's brought Barnes to Paris, where she lived for the following decade. During that period she published A Book in 1923, a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories that was later reissued with three additional stories as A Night Among the Horses in 1929. She also published Ladies Almanack and Ryder, both in 1928. Throughout the 1930s she moved between England, Paris, New York, and North Africa, and it was during this period that she wrote and published Nightwood, her 1936 novel that became a cult classic of lesbian fiction and a significant work of modernist literature. Barnes returned to New York in October 1939 after nearly two decades spent largely in Europe. Her final major work, the verse play The Antiphon, appeared in 1958. She died in her Greenwich Village apartment in June 1982 at the age of ninety.