Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist

Lois Gordon

Published by Columbia University Press 2007

Nancy Cunard

Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist

Lois Gordon

https://doi.org/10.7312/gord13938

Overview
Contents

About this book

Lois Gordon's absorbing biography tells the story of a writer, activist, and cultural icon who embodied the dazzling energy and tumultuous spirit of her age, and whom William Carlos Williams once called "one of the major phenomena of history."

Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) led a life that surpasses Hollywood fantasy. The only child of an English baronet (and heir to the Cunard shipping fortune) and an American beauty, Cunard abandoned the world of a celebrated socialite and Jazz Age icon to pursue a lifelong battle against social injustice as a wartime journalist, humanitarian aid worker, and civil rights champion.

Cunard fought fascism on the battlefields of Spain and reported firsthand on the atrocities of the French concentration camps. Intelligent and beautiful, she romanced the great writers of her era, including three Nobel Prize winners, and was the inspiration for characters in the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

Cunard was also a prolific poet, publisher, and translator and, after falling in love with a black American jazz pianist, became deeply committed to fighting for black rights. She edited the controversial anthology Negro, the first comprehensive study of the achievement and plight of blacks around the world. Her contributors included Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, among scores of others.

Cunard's personal life was as complex as her public persona. Her involvement with the civil rights movement led her to be ridiculed and rejected by both family and friends. Throughout her life, she was plagued by insecurities and suffered a series of breakdowns, struggling with a sense of guilt over her promiscuous behavior and her ability to survive so much war and tragedy. Yet Cunard's writings also reveal an immense kindness and wit, as well as her renowned, often flamboyant defiance of prejudiced social conventions.

Drawing on diaries, correspondence, historical accounts, and the remembrances of others, Lois Gordon revisits the major movements of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of a truly gifted and extraordinary woman. She also returns Nancy Cunard to her rightful place as a major figure in the historical, social, and artistic events of a critical era.

Author / Editor information

Lois Gordon, distinguished professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, is internationally known for her work in drama and American culture. She is the author of the first book in the United States on Harold Pinter, and her most recent books include Pinter at 70; The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946; Reading Godot; and American Chronicle: Year by Year Through the Twentieth Century, a classic reference on American culture.

Reviews

Sarah Mower:
[An] immensely detailed biography.

A fascinating and ultimately poignant story.

Lois Gordon's biography of Nancy Cunard arrives at a time when we sorely need exemplars for art and activism.

Mary V. Dearborn:
[A] fine biography-extremely well researched and felicitously written.

Carla Kaplan:
[Lois Gordon] vividly reconstructs the Cunard legend and brings her back to life.

Jen Ortiz:
Gordon provides a perfect illustration of Cunard's fascinating, moving life...your perfect summertime read.

This extraordinary life has been well served by Gordon.

Megan O'Grady:
A worthy biography of the Jazz Age beauty who mesmerized Pound and Elliot.

Here is a fascinating life story, delivered in absorbing detail.

Gordon brings a literary sensibility, a historian's insight, and psychological fluency to her groundbreaking and alternately mesmerizing and shattering biography.

This able, diligently researched biography... revives the memory of a remarkable woman against the backdrop of major 20th-century events.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
1. Golden Girl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Coming of Age During a Revolution in the Arts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	20
3. Counterpoint of War in London Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
4. Postwar Breakdown Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
5. Return to the World in Paris Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	90
6. Reluctant Icon Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	125
7. Nancy as Publisher Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
8. Prelude to Negro Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	156
9. Negro Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
10. Nancy as Journalist: Scottsboro, Ethiopia, Spain Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	196
11. On the Front Lines in the Spanish Civil War Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	220
12. Exposing the Concentration Camps After Franco’s Victory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	242
13. Exile and Resistance in World War II Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
14. Surviving Réanville Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	300
15. Escaping La Mothe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	322
16. The Last Great Glare Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	343
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	372
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	377
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	429

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 504
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 70
- Other: 70 illus.

eBook

Published: March 27, 2007
ISBN: 9780231511377