Djuna Barnes

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Djuna Barnes was an American modernist writer and visual artist. Her hugely successful novel Nightwood (1936) has become a cult classic of lesbian fiction. Barnes began her career as a journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1913. Within a year, Barnes was a highly-sought features reporter and interviewer whose work appeared in the New York City’s leading newspapers and periodicals. Later, Barnes became part of Greenwich Village’s Bohemian community and began publishing her prose, poems, illustrations, and one-act plays in both avant-garde literary journals and popular magazines. She published her first illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women, in 1915. In 1921, she left New York for Paris, where she published three more works: A Book (1923), Ladies Almanack (1928), and Ryder (1928).