Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes , 1892-1982, American author, b. Cornwall, N.Y. She is best known for her modernist novel Nightwood (1936), which, in its sense of horror and decay, was likened by T. S. Eliot, who edited the book, to an Elizabethan tragedy. Barnes also wrote several one-act plays produced by the Provincetown Players from 1919 to 1920. Her other works include Ryder (1928), a novel; collections of short stories and poems, including A Night Among Horses (1929) and Selected Works (1962); and The Antiphon (1958), a tragedy in verse.

Bibliography: See biographies by A. Field (1983, 1985) and P. Herring (1995).

Barnes, Djuna (1892–1982), New York‐born author long resident in Europe. Her first major work was A Book (1923) of short plays, stories, and poems, introspective analyses of people whose temperamental sympathies lie with the simple lives of animals. It was reissued with three new stories as A Night Among the Horses (1929), and the stories were somewhat refashioned as Spillway in her Selected Works (1962). Ryder (1928) is a satirical novel in the stream‐of‐consciousness style, concerned with a man's relations with his mother, his wife, and his mistresses. Nightwood (1936), a novel of the relationships of five psychopathic people, has been described by T.S. Eliot as having “a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” The Antiphon (1958) is a blank‐verse play. Other publications are The Book of Repulsive Women (1948), poems and drawings created in 1915, and Vagaries Malicieux (1975), two essays based on life in Paris of the 1920s but described as stories. Smoke and Other Early Stories (1982) collects juvenilia. Interviews (1985) gathers her journalistic talks with and drawings of persons as various as Joyce and Jack Dempsey. New York (1989) collects from newspapers her impressions between 1913 and 1919 of Coney Island and other local areas.