published and unpublished, for the first time.

Barnes was born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, in 1892, and brought up on a farm in an unconventional, some would say dysfunctional, family. Her father Wald was a failed artist and a polygamist. She lived with her mother, father, brothers, grandmother, and Wald’s other ‘wife’ Fanny, and her children, also by him. The Barnes children were all educated at home, largely by their grandmother, Zadel Barnes, who was a suffragist, journalist and spirit medium. Her childhood was not happy, and it would haunt both her life and writing. She would write complex and furious accounts of family life in her 1928 novel Ryder and her 1958 play The Antiphon.

In 1912 Barnes moved to New York City with her mother and brothers, where she joined the Pratt Institute of Art. She studied there for several months before money shortages forced her to look for work. She began working as a cub writer and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, reporting on local crime and courtroom hearings. In 1913, Carl Van Vechten hired her to write for the New York Press, where she wrote theatre reviews and interviews, meeting some of the celebrities of the day, including Lillian Russell and Florenz Zeigfeld. She began working for the New York World in 1914, writing stunt features about her experiences as a dummy body for trainee fire fighters, and, most shockingly, about the experience of being force fed. In the light of the imprisonment and force-feeding of the British suffragettes, Barnes had agreed to undergo this ordeal, and she wrote about it in touching and gruesome detail in a piece entitled simply, ‘How it Feels to be Forcibly Fed’. She also developed a fascination with boxing. Women had only recently been admitted to boxing matches and she embraced this new opportunity for spectacle with relish. She interviewed Jack Dempsey and Jess Willard and wrote several articles about her experiences attending bouts.

In 1915 Barnes moved to Greenwich Village, where she lived until 1921, mingling with the bohemian and artistic community for which it was famous. She did, however, retain a certain distance from this crowd, writing satirical articles about ‘bohemia’, such as ‘Becoming Intimate with the Bohemians’ and ‘How the Villagers Amuse Themselves’ for New York’s daily press. She joined the Little Theatre movement, writing and performing in plays with the Provincetown Players. She had numerous love affairs with both men and women, and was briefly viii