Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes

"She was a familiar figure in Greenwich Village and Left Bank literary and lesbian circles during the teens, twenties, and thirties. Admired by her contemporaries for her wickedly incisive wit as well as for her great beauty and style, Djuna Barnes consorted with the likes of Peggy Guggenheim, Natalie Barney, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, who championed her masterpiece Nightwood. Nevertheless, because of her fanatic need for privacy, she remained, as she said of herself, "the most famous unknown of the century." Barnes's fiction, poems, and plays--filled with a vengeful creative rage with staved off alcoholism and suicide-- are hardly more compelling and bizarre than her own story, which included a treacherous early family life, violent sexual "initiation," affairs with both men and women, and a passionate relationship with the artist Thelma Wood, whose betrayal engendered the tragic, satirical Nightwood"--Back cover