Black Sun Press
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Black Sun Press was an English language book publisher founded in 1927 as Éditions Narcisse by poet Harry Crosby and his wife Mary Phelps Jacob, who at the time were expatriates living in Paris. The name was changed to Black Sun Press the following year.
It was originally formed to publish the works of its founders in lavish, hard-bound volumes. It expanded to publish a number of eminent 20th century authors, including D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce, who were friends of Crosby. It also published works by Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Jolas, and Oscar Wilde.
In 1921 Harry Crosby married Mary Phelps Jacob, who later took the name "Caresse" Crosby. Two days after their wedding, they moved to Paris, France, where he worked in his uncle's bank. Uninterested in a respectable banker's life and desiring to pursue life as a poet, Crosby quit his job at the Morton Harjes Bank and in April of 1927 he and wife Caresse founded a book publishing company. Originally named Éditions Narcisse, it was later changed to the Black Sun Press. By 1928, Harry Crosby gained some recognition as a poet after the publishing of his Red Skeletons collection said to be heavily indebted to Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe.
