An exciting figure among the avant-garde of Paris in the 1920s, Caresse Crosby is little known today. She and her husband Harry founded the Black Sun Press, early publishers of such titans as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. This flamboyant chapter of her life ended when Harry and his lover shot themselves in a sensational suicide pact. Caresse was thirty-six. Ever resilient, Caresse lived and loved another forty years, consorted with some two hundred lovers, married again, and established a refuge in Virginia for uprooted artists like Salvador Dali and Henry Miller. In response to the atom bomb, she declared herself a citizen-of-the-world and organized Women Against War, furthering a worldwide peace movement. In her later years, she bought a feudal castle in Italy—“Castello de Rocca Sinibalda”—to provide a home for artists and pacifists. She died there in 1970.
“Caresse Crosby is probably one of the least recognizable of all the names remembered from literary and artistic circles on 1920s Paris, yet her life touched the most promising and gifted artists of a generation. Idealist, poet, friend, lover, and muse, Crosby deserves to be remembered. Anne Conover has unearthed a gem with her account of this free-spirited and flamboyant woman—ahead of her time, she was a woman who endured, often spectacularly.” —William Clair, Voyages“Called by Anaïs Nin ‘a pollen carrier, who mixed, stirred, brewed, and concocted friendships,’ Crosby is best known as an expatriate in 1920s Paris who, with her husband Harry, founded Black Sun Press. Their life in Paris has already been chronicled in Geoffrey Wolff’s Black Sun (1976), which stops with Harry’s suicide in 1929. Conover concentrates on the following 41 years of Crosby’s life as poet, publisher, and social activist. —Library Journal 1989
“This admiring biography follows the life of the American beauty who invented the brassiere to wear at her New York society debut in 1910. Divorced from an alcohol-prone husband by whom she had two children, Mary Phelps Jacob married Harry Crosby, who gave her the pen-name ‘Caresse’ and with whom she lived in Paris, wrote poetry and published Joyce, Eliot and Pound through their Black Sun Press. After Harry killed himself, Caresse went on to establish a gallery of modern art in wartime Washington, published a literary magazine, espoused the cause of world citizenship, and became ‘principessa’ of a 72-room ruined castle outside Rome for young literati with limited funds.” —Publishers Weekly 1989
“Caresse Crosby is probably one of the least recognizable of all the names remembered from literary and artistic circles on 1920s Paris, yet her life touched the most promising and gifted artists of a generation. Idealist, poet, friend, lover, and muse, Crosby deserves to be remembered. Anne Conover has unearthed a gem with her account of this free-spirited and flamboyant woman—ahead of her time, she was a woman who endured, often spectacularly.” —William Clair, Voyages
