Nightwood

Description

Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T.S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood 'while it was still running.' That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight year relationship with the love of her life. Now recognised as a twentieth-century classic, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.

Djuna Barnes was born in 1892 in Cornwall-on-Hudson in New York State. She studied art and worked as a journalist in New York before moving to Paris in the twenties. Her other works include The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), Ladies Almanack (1928), Ryder (1928), the verse play The Antiphon (1958), and collections of journalism, interviews and short stories. She returned to Greenwich Village in1940 and died there in 1982.

Djuna Barnes is a writer of wild and original gifts. . . .To her name there is always to be attached the splendor of Nightwood, a lasting achievement of her great gifts and eccentricities---her passionate prose and, in this case, a genuineness of human passions.--Elizabeth Hardwick