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Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist
Columbia University Press
March 2006
On Sale: March 1, 2006
Featuring: Nancy Cunard
504 pages
ISBN: 0231139381
EAN: 9780231139380
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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 aseries 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.
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