Caresse Crosby
From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This admiring, undiscriminating biography by a freelance writer breathlessly follows the career 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 (1892-1970) married Harry Crosby, who gave her the name Caresse and with whom she lived profligately in Paris, wrote poetry and published Joyce, Eliot and Pound in her Black Sun Press. After Harry killed himself and his girlfriend in 1929, Caresse, ``always partial to titles,'' never ceased her quest for adventure and numerous lovers. She ran a gallery of modern art in wartime Washington, published a cultural magazine, espoused the cause of world citizenship, and later, as ``principessa'' of Roccasinibaldasp? diff't from title/glad you caught that.gs , a 72-room ruined castle outside Rome, entertained young literati for whom, with limited funds, she ``could make a Renaissance meal out of a package of soup and a poetry reading.'' Photos not seen by PW.
