Becoming Modern - by Carolyn Burke (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism--in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante; in Mexico with the greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism--and one woman's important contribution to it.

Review Quotes

"For the whole of the twentieth century Mina Loy has been the Missing Person of Modernism; now at last Carolyn Burke has brought her to life, and into the life of her time. Becoming Modern is a perfect example of biographical recovery: it will change our sense of what happened back then, when art was being made new." --Samuel Hynes

"A brilliant recovery of the mysterious life of the great lost "Anglo-mongrel" modernist. Loy, at last, becomes an equal in the company she kept." --Eliot Weinberger

About the Author

Carolyn Burke is the author of Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy; Lee Miller: A Life; and No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf.