Book Description
The best writings of one of the great twentieth-century American stylists, whose extraordinary novel
Nightwood, about rootless and sexually ambiguous expatriates in Paris between the wars, is a modern classic. T. S. Eliot praised it for 'the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and the quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy'.
As well as Nightwood this striking volume contains Spillway, a collection of early stories, and the rare and remarkable verse play The Antiphon, completed at the end of Djuna Barnes's life.
About the Author
Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York State. In 1912 she enrolled as a student at Pratt Institute and then at the Art Students' League, and while she was there she started to work as a reporter and illustrator for the
Brooklyn Eagle. In 1921 she moved to Paris, where she lived for almost twenty years and wrote for such publications as
Vanity Fair and the
New Yorker.
Nightwood, written in 1936, was her second novel. It is now considered a masterpiece, praised by T. S. Eliot for its 'great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy'. Her other works include
A Book, a collection of short stories, poems and plays,
Ryder, Ladies Almanack, and a verse play,
The Antiphon. She died in New York in 1982.
