Barnes,Djuna

Born in 1892, Djuna Barnes was active as a writer between 1913 and 1982, the date of her death. Her most famous work is the now classic modernist novel,Nightwood(2007 [1936]), first published with an enthusiastic introduction by T. S. Eliot. Her experimental oeuvre spans a dazzling range of genres and media. Her first collection of “rhymes and rhythms,” which she illustrated, was published in 1915 (1994 [1915]), and a collection of short stories, plays, and portraits entitledA Bookappeared in 1923, and was later republished asA Night Among the Horses(1929). Her illustrated picaresque novelRyder(1928) was briefly a bestseller, while the same year she privately distributed in Paris her illustratedLadies Almanack(2006 [1928]). A sample of her artwork can be accessed in the volumePoe's Mother(1995), while a larger number of originals are available in the Djuna Barnes Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland, College Park. In 1958 Faber and Faber published her verse play,The Antiphon. Most of her poems were published posthumously, in 1982 and in 2005.