June 12, 1892

Poet, novelist and playwright Djuna Barnes is born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. Her literary reputation was made with the publication of the novel Nightwood (1936), which T. S. Eliot praised for its atmosphere of "Jacobean tragedy." Her style, themes and topics — odd neuroses, depravity, animals, lesbians — were quite original at the time. Barnes influenced many younger writers.