Djuna Barnes

Barnes grew up in a chaotic, unconventional household in upstate New York (her father kept two families under one roof, and she later hinted at abuse in that home she never fully named) before working her way into New York journalism as a fearless stunt reporter, once having herself force-fed to report on the treatment of hunger-striking suffragettes.

In Paris she fell into a turbulent, years-long relationship with the sculptor Thelma Wood, the doomed love affair that became Nightwood's raw material; T. S. Eliot, who edited the manuscript for Faber and championed it, wrote the introduction that helped secure its reputation.

For the last four decades of her life she lived as a recluse in a single room on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, rarely leaving, and died there in 1982 at ninety.