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American Lesbian
Literature, 1900-1969 |
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Twentieth-century American lesbian literature prior to the
Stonewall rebellion exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it
moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political
celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.
Ann Bannon's Women in the Shadows, recently reissued by
Cleis Press
Ann Bannon (b. 1932)
wrote five interlinked pulp novels set in mid-twentieth century
Greenwich village that provide an important record of lesbian life at
the time.
Djuna Barnes
(1892-1982) was a novelist who sought new forms of lesbian
self-representation in the face of society's compulsory
heterosexuality.
 Natalie Clifford
Barney (1877-1972), an expatriate known as the Amazon, was a poet,
memoirist, epigrammatist, and muse to other writers.
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Elizabeth Bishop
(1911-1979), a twentieth-century poet widely acknowledged as one of
America's best, encoded a lesbian identity in her poems. |
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 Willa Cather
(1873-1947), one of America's premier literary artists in the earlier
twentieth-century, reflected her lesbianism in her work. |
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 Hilda Doolittle
(1886-1961), a bisexual poet and novelist who published under the
initials H. D., celebrated women's romantic relationships with each
other. |
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Barbara Grier
(b. 1933), a bibliographer, editor, and co-founder of Naiad Press, has
been an important nurturer of lesbian literature.
Sara Orne Jewett
(1849-1909) is a major figure in the literature of female romantic
friendship, the precursor of modern lesbian literature. |
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 Edna St. Vincent
Millay (1892-1950) expressed her bisexuality in her life and in her
poems and plays. |
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Pulp Paperbacks
and their Covers subverted prohibitions against homosexual
expression during the 1950s and 1960s. |
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 Gertrude Stein
(1874-1946) was, with Alice B. Toklas, half of an iconic lesbian couple
and an important innovator and transformer of the English language. |
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more on American
Literature >> |
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Photo
Credits: Photograph of Women in the Shadows courtesy of
Cleis Press. The
remaining images appear courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division. The photograph of Natalie Clifford Barney is a
detail from a portrait by Frances Benjamin Powers. The photographs of
Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein are details from portraits by Carl Van
Vechten. The photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay is a detail from a
portrait by Arnold Genthe. |
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