Product Description
Maria McDonald Jolas, a member of a distinguished Kentucky family and cofounder with Eugene Jolas of the international literary journal transition, has been called a survivor of the heroic generation and, somewhat to her discomfort, "the leading lady of Paris literati of the Thirties." Her memoir and other writings, edited and introduced by Mary Ann Caws, reveal the truth in those accolades as well as the measure of her contribution to our understanding of modernism. Completing the portrait of her family's life begun in her husband's autobiography, Man from Babel, this volume sheds light on the remarkable achievements of the other half of a celebrated partnership. As one of the primary forces behind transition, Maria Jolas helped introduce the world to the twentieth-century's literary avant-garde, among them Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce. A skillful translator, Jolas is renowned for her renderings of Gaston Bachelard's philosophical texts, Nathalie Sarraute's novels and plays, and works by Joyce. In addition, Jolas founded an influential school, the Ecole Bilingue in France, and the celebra
About the Author
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. She has written widely on the relations between art and literature in such works as The Surrealist Look and Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar. Caws has also written biographies of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust and is the editor and cotranslator of the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry. Caws lives in New York City.
