About

Barnes’s New York Journalism

In July 1912, the twenty-year old Djuna Barnes moved to New York City with her mother and three of her brothers. In June the following year she began working as a journalist and illustrator for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Her career progressed and she wrote for the New York Press between December 1913 and May 1915. From 1916 to 1918, Barnes was employed by The New York Morning Telegraph where she contributed regular pieces to their Sunday magazine. Many of these articles appeared on the magazine’s front page and she illustrated them all. Barnes also wrote war-related pieces for The New York Sun magazine in the early months of 1918 and went on to publish a range of syndicated pieces in US newspapers from May 1920.

Barnes’s early journalism was prodigious. Between June 1913 and May 1921, she wrote at least 150 articles, often illustrating them. These included interviews with the labour activist ‘Mother Jones’, the boxing champion Jack Dempsey and the Hollywood star Mary Pickford. She wrote articles on chorus girls, Coney Island, tea shops, and fishing. She undertook ‘stunt’ journalism assignments for the New York World Magazine, which included an infamous article on force-feeding and her ‘interview’ with a young female gorilla in the Bronx Zoo, both available on the NYJDB.

By 1922, Barnes had moved to Paris, along with many fellow US expatriates, where she lived through the 1920s, establishing her reputation as an avant-garde writer of fiction, poetry, and drama. After many years in Europe, Barnes returned to live in New York in 1940. She settled in Greenwich Village where she remained until her death in 1982. Barnes is best known as the author of a diverse set of modernist texts: The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), A Book (1923), Ryder (1928), Ladies Almanack (1928), Nightwood (1936), and The Antiphon (1958). The journalism that Barnes wrote in New York between 1912 and 1922 stands as a unique and distinctive record of her emerging modernist voice and of a vibrant and dynamic decade in US culture.

History of the NYJDB digital edition

Work on the edition began in 2022, having been inspired by Alex Goody’s ongoing research into Barnes and her journalism. Pilot funding was awarded by Oxford Brookes University, enabling the hiring of Xander Ryan as a postdoctoral researcher. Further support was given by the British Academy’s Small Research Grants scheme.

The first task was to establish a full bibliography of Barnes’s New York journalism, focusing on texts that she wrote and illustrated in New York before her move to Paris in the early 1920s. We gathered photographs and scans for as much of the corpus as possible. Next, we sketched out a process and infrastructure for digital publication. We decided to ground our edition in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), a well-established mark-up language devised and developed by scholars working in the digital humanities.

Our edition aims to make Barnes’s journalism available to a wide readership as well as providing the features of a critical edition, including annotations and basic contextual information. A key advantage of having a digital edition is the ability to offer zoomable images of the original documents alongside annotated transcriptions. The edition gathers articles from a disparate documentary archive, with relevant newspapers and magazines housed in archives across the US and some now existing only on microfilm. We hope that the images allow partial access to the original form in which Barnes’s journalism was published and read, including the visual appeal and mixed space of the broadsheet newspaper. Images also allow readers to enjoy Barnes’s illustrations, which were a central part of her journalistic practice.

By summer 2023, project encoding guidelines were established and a first selection of articles had been transcribed and annotated. At this point, Jack Thacker joined the NYJDB team as a freelance software developer. Together we devised a deployment plan, with our infrastructure built using eXist-DB software and an app generated by TEI Publisher.

The digital edition is being launched in June 2024 with an initial small selection of articles, at the annual conference of the British Association of Modernist Studies.

Future of the NYJDB digital edition

Work is underway on a second, expanded version of the NYJDB digital edition, with publication scheduled for June 2026. This second version will include 50 further articles, a complete bibliography of all Barnes’s journalism written in New York 1911-1921, and a biographical timeline.

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