Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was an avant-garde American artist and writer. She published several book-length works, but is perhaps best known for novel Nightwood (1936), a groundbreaking Modernist novel portraying themes of love, gender roles, and homosexuality.
Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland Libraries are the primary repository for the Djuna Barnes papers. Her papers consist of family and personal papers, correspondence, publications, manuscript drafts, newspaper clippings, serials, photographs, and original art work documenting Barnes's career. Significant correspondents in the collection include T. S. Eliot, Emily Coleman, Marianne Moore, Peggy Guggenheim, Dag Hammarskjöld, Kay Boyle, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert McAlmon, Laurence Vail, Allan Ross Macdougall, Allen Tate, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Eugene O'Neill.
Material from the Djuna Barnes papers is available to researchers in the Maryland Room at the University of Maryland's Hornbake Library. The finding aid for the Djuna Barnes papers is available online.
In additional to her personal papers, the Special Collections and University Archives holds her personal library. The cataloged portion of the Djuna Barnes Library contains nearly 900 titles which can be searched and browsed using the University of Maryland Libraries online catalog. The library was part of the collection purchased from Miss Barnes in 1973 and 1977, along with her personal and family papers, correspondence, writings, printed matter, and serial publications. The Libraries continue to augment these Barnes holdings through purchase and donation.
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