Djuna Barnes was born on June 12, 1892 in New York State. She was homeschooled by her father in her early years. She later attended the Pratt Institute and the Art and Student League; while at Pratt she worked as an illustrator and correspondent for the Brooklyn Eagle. Not much is known about Barnes’ private life. She is known to have had affairs with both men and women. She never married.

Barnes was sent to Paris in 1921 as a correspondent for McCalls. While there she made friendships with some of the most influential female authors and poets in Paris at the time; women such as Mina Loy and Natalie Barney. People referred to them as the Academy of Women. She also is considered part of the Lost Generation. Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, considered Barnes to be “one of the most talented, and, I think, one of the most fascinating literary figures in the Paris of the Twenties.”

Djuna Barnes’ poetry was first published in 1915 in The Book of Repulsive Women. She also wrote plays, several of which were perfomed by the Provincetown Players. In 1928, she wrote the Ladies Almanack which caricatured several of her friends, most noticeably Natalie Barney. She wrote several novels and published various volumes of poetry; her masterpiece is considered to be Nightwood. T.S. Eliot wrote in his introduction of Nightwood that it is a novel of “great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.”

Djuna Barnes returned to the United States in 1941 and basically lived as a recluse until her death in 1982.

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