Djuna Barnes Biography Quotes 16 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in New York State, and she grew up in a household that encouraged artistic experiment while refusing many social conventions. Her grandmother, Zadel Barnes, was a well-known feminist and journalist whose example linked literature with political life and gave Barnes an early model of women speaking publicly and sharply. Formal schooling was uneven, and Barnes studied intensively at home before training in New York at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League. Drawing, design, and theatre fascinated her as strongly as language, and the interplay among these arts remained central to her sense of form. The unorthodox values of her family, along with early experiences she later evoked obliquely in prose and drama, shaped the mixture of defiance and vulnerability that readers have long felt in her work.

New York Journalist and Illustrator
By the 1910s Barnes was a working illustrator, poet, and reporter in New York City. She wrote for newspapers and magazines, including the New York World, and built a reputation for vivid interviews, theatrical profiles, and daring participatory pieces. In one widely noted article, she underwent a medical force-feeding to describe the brutal treatment inflicted on hunger-striking suffragists, linking her reporting to the era's most urgent debates on women's bodies and political rights. She contributed poems and drawings to little magazines, and in 1915 she issued her first book, The Book of Repulsive Women, a suite of poems with her own illustrations. The blend of mordant humor, theatrical pose, and stark line drawings already displayed the arresting style she would carry into fiction and drama.

Expatriate Paris and the Modernist Milieu
Barnes moved to Europe in the early 1920s and made Paris her base, entering the expatriate world that included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Janet Flanner, and Sylvia Beach. She profiled Joyce in one of the earliest English-language interviews that caught his stagey diffidence and fierce seriousness, and she frequented Beach's bookshop, a hub for writers and translators pushing modern prose into new shapes. Photographer Berenice Abbott and other artists of the Left Bank recorded Barnes's hawk-like visage; the austere portraits underscore how deliberately she fashioned herself as an emblem of the new art.

Barnes's circle also included Natalie Clifford Barney, whose salon gave space to women writers and artists. Out of that world came Ladies Almanack (1928), a roman a clef that both satirized and celebrated a lesbian social constellation. The book's mock-arch tone masks an ethic of loyalty and critique, a balance Barnes pursued repeatedly as she wrote about friends and lovers in terms at once mythic and bruisingly intimate.

Fiction Before Nightwood
With A Book (1923), a miscellany of short fiction, poems, and plays, and with her illustrated family chronicle Ryder (1928), Barnes elaborated a prose dense with allusion, slapstick, and Elizabethan pastiche. Robert McAlmon, a key patron and publisher for the modernist avant-garde, supported her work early on. Ryder's bawdy energies and anti-Victorian stance both scandalized and delighted reviewers, and the book consolidated her reputation as an uncompromising stylist.

Thelma Wood and the Making of Nightwood
Barnes's relationship with the American artist Thelma Wood, by turns ardent and catastrophic, became the emotional engine behind Nightwood (1936), the novel that secured her place in literary history. The book transforms elements of their lives in Paris and Berlin into a nocturnal labyrinth of speech: Nora Flood's fidelity, Robin Vote's fugitive magnetism, and Dr. Matthew O'Connor's incantatory monologues revolve around desire's lawless pull and the failure of social scripts to contain it. T. S. Eliot, then an editor at Faber and Faber, recognized the book's originality and wrote an introduction for its publication. He also worked closely with the text as it moved toward print, and his advocacy helped Nightwood reach readers who might otherwise have missed its austere, haunted music.

Return to the United States
As Europe drifted toward war, Barnes returned to New York. She settled at 5 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she lived for decades, increasingly private yet tenaciously productive. The poet e. e. cummings lived nearby, and the narrow court became a discrete enclave of modernist survivals in postwar Manhattan. Friends and editors continued to visit, among them Emily Holmes Coleman, whose practical support and unstinting attention helped Barnes through bouts of illness and drinking. Though she often avoided public literary life, she worked steadily, revising earlier texts, drafting new poems and plays, and answering letters with a precision that confirmed how fiercely she guarded her language.

The Antiphon and Late Work
Barnes's verse drama The Antiphon (1958) turned back toward family trauma and the corrosions of inheritance. Its choral, baroque diction and ritual structures placed it at an angle to the mainstream stage, but admirers recognized the integrity of its design and its relentless examination of memory. Over the years she prepared and reworked selections of early stories and poems, preserving the graphic sharpness and verbal torque that had marked her first publications.

Style, Themes, and Craft
Across journalism, fiction, poetry, and drama, Barnes fused theatricality with a sculptor's exactness. Her sentences, often knotted with metaphor and antique cadence, force the reader to move slowly, to listen for tonal shifts as if hearing actors cross a dim stage. She wrote about women's worlds with a candor uncommon in her time, mapping queer desire, jealousy, and endurance without apology. Nightwood in particular gives speech to characters who exist outside sanctioned forms of kinship, and it does so without translating them into the language of tolerance or pathology. Instead, the novel gives them their own gravity, their law of motion.

Circles, Collaborations, and Advocates
Barnes's career was sustained by a network of artists and editors who grasped the singularity of her work even when wider audiences hesitated. James Joyce, encountered in Paris, served as a counterexample in courage and form; Gertrude Stein's authority as a woman of letters carved a path Barnes could consider and resist in equal measure. T. S. Eliot's introduction to Nightwood remains one of the most consequential acts of advocacy in modernist publishing. Robert McAlmon's early backing set the conditions for Barnes to pursue risk. Berenice Abbott's portraits documented her presence as decisively as any jacket copy. Natalie Barney's salon gave her a combustible, sustaining environment. Emily Holmes Coleman's friendship and practical care helped her guard the work through difficult years. These people, in various times and places, made it possible for Barnes to hold the line on her standards.

Reception and Legacy
Initial reviews of Barnes's major books often mixed perplexity with admiration. Over time, scholars and writers came to recognize that the difficulty was the point: her prose cuts against commonsense narrative in order to capture states of rapture, panic, and reminiscence that ordinary syntax cannot carry. Nightwood became a touchstone for queer literature, for feminist criticism attentive to style, and for anyone interested in how modernism could accommodate emotion without surrendering complexity. Generations of novelists and poets, from experimentalists in the postwar decades to contemporary writers investigating gender and desire, have learned from her example.

Final Years
Barnes lived quietly in Greenwich Village for the rest of her life, emerging rarely, as if preserving the nightworld that had once nourished her art. Visitors recalled a sharp wit undiluted by time and a fierce commitment to accuracy in word and memory. She died in New York City in 1982. The rooms at Patchin Place, where she had revised sentences until they rang to her liking, became part of the legend: a testament to an American writer who made out of expatriate circles, urban journalism, love's upheavals, and the old cadences of English a body of work unlike any other.

Our collection contains 16 quotes who is written by Djuna, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Dark Humor - Deep - Art.

• Djuna Barnes pronunciation: JOO-nuh BARNS (IPA: /ˈdʒuːnə/).
• Nightwood Djuna Barnes: Her 1936 modernist novel about expatriate life and queer love, praised by T. S. Eliot.
• Djuna Barnes art: She was also an illustrator, known for bold line drawings for magazines and her books.
• Djuna Barnes famous works: Nightwood; Ryder; Ladies Almanack; The Antiphon.
• Djuna Barnes race: White American.
• Djuna Barnes books: Nightwood; Ryder; Ladies Almanack; The Antiphon; The Book of Repulsive Women; Spillway.
• Was Djuna Barnes black: No. She was white.
• How old was Djuna Barnes? She became 90 years old

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