Caresse Crosby: From Black Sun to Roccasinibalda - Paperback

by Anne Conover (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Anne Conover holds a BA and an MA from Stanford University, and lives in Washington, D.C. She has held editor/writer positions with the U.S. Information Agency, Johns Hopkins University Press, and the Library of Congress. She has authored several biographies of women including Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well . . ." which was nominated for Best Biography of the Year (2001).