Miriam Thaggert is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and the author of Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad (2022) and Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance (2010). She is coeditor of A History of the Harlem Renaissance (2021) and African American Literature in Transition,1920–30 (2022).
Miriam Thaggert
Contributions
Judging by its Cover, Part 1
On October 26, 1936, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to American writer and host of an influential Parisian literary salon, Natalie Barney. In it he admitted with discernible embarrassment that his most recent author at Faber & Faber, Djuna Barnes—whose Ladies Almanack (1928) was about Barney’s salon and featured her as the character Dame Evangeline Musset—did not approve of the design for the first edition of Nightwood. “I must explain,” he writes,