Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes (June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American writer and artist best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.

In 1913, Barnes began her career as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By early 1914, Barnes was a highly sought feature reporter, interviewer, and illustrator whose work appeared in the city’s leading newspapers and periodicals. Later, Barnes’ talent and connections with prominent Greenwich Village bohemians afforded her the opportunity to publish her prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays in both avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines, and publish an illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915).

In 1921, a lucrative commission with McCall’s magazine took Barnes to Paris, where she lived for the next ten years. In this period she published A Book (1923), a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories, which was later reissued, with the addition of three stories, as A Night Among the Horses (1929), Ladies Almanack (1928), and Ryder (1929).