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An American debutante turned expatriate writer and literary benefactor, Caresse Crosby rejected the culturally prescribed roles of women of her era and background in search of an independent, creative, and socially responsible life. Poet, memoirist, advocate of women’s rights and the peace movement, Crosby published and promoted modern writers and artists such as from Hart Crane, Dorothy Parker, Salvador Dali, and Romare Bearden. She also earned a place in the world of fashion by patenting one of the earliest versions of the brassiere.

Behind her public success was a chaotic life: three marriages, two divorces, the suicide of Harry Crosby, strained relationships with her children, and legal confrontations over efforts to establish a left for world peace. As the first biographer to consider both the literary and social contexts of Crosby’s life, Linda Hamalian details Crosby’s professional accomplishments and her personal struggles. also measures the impact of small presses on modernist literature and draws connections between key writers and artists of the era.

Born Mary Phelps Jacob in 1892 to aristocratic parents in New York City, Crosby acquired additional wealth and prestige when she married into the Peabody family in 1915. But she rebuffed her comfortable class affiliations and scandalized Boston society when she left Richard Peabody to marry Harry Crosby in 1922. It was Harry who convinced her to change her name to Caresse and who later called her his Cramoisy Queen. The couple moved to Paris, where Harry was a writer and Caresse took art classes. Together, they founded Black Sun Press, which published such influential figures as D. H. Lawrence, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce and also reprinted classic texts in letter press editions. Arguing that Caresse was the driving force behind Black Sun Press, Hamalian outlines how she far surpassed her programmed role as the mirror-companion of her husband in this literary endeavor. In fact, Caresse published five volumes of poetry, among them Graven Images with Houghton Mifflin in 1926. After Harry’s suicide in 1929, Crosby directed the press for the next thirty years. She returned to the United States, where she associated with such figures as Henry Miller and Anais Nin, publicized the work of Salvador Dali, opened an art gallery in Washington, D.C., published the cross-disciplinary journal Portfolio. She also worked with Buckminster Fuller and others on plans for international world peace. In 1951, her autobiography, The Passionate Years, was released from Dial Press.

In addition to securing a place for Crosby in modern literary and cultural history, contributes to the field of textual studies, specifically the complexities of integrating autobiography and correspondence into biography. Enhanced by thirty-two illustrations, the volume appeals to a wide range of readers, including literary critics, cultural historians, biographers, and gender studies specialists.

"Better than reading Fitzgerald, for the dazzling and complicated world of artists and ex-pats in the twenties and thirties, Linda Hamalian's The Cramoisy Queen also guides us through the post–World War II forties, the fifties, and the swinging sixties to follow the escapades that accompanied Caresse Crosby's life at Black Sun Press and beyond. A web connecting the rich and famous, including the idealistic search of so many artists for world peace, is beautifully woven in this meticulously researched biography." —Diane Wakoski, author of more than twenty collections of poetry, including The Butcher’s Apron

"The Cramoisy Queen is a great page-turning read. Caresse Crosby is a larger-than-life character, and Linda Hamalian retells her life in a way that's gossipy and erudite, informative and thought-provoking. How did the inventor of the brassiere come to be—among other things—a free-loving flapper, a patron of the arts, a poet, a publisher of exquisite books by the great writers of her era, and a determined activist for world peace? Hamalian's beautifully written portrait of an artist as a young woman, as a midlife widow, and as a feisty old lady needs to be savored for inspiration and as a window into the questions we're still asking about what women want and how we can get it." —Emily Toth, biographer, and author of Kate Chopin, Unveiling Kate Chopin, and Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious

"Linda Hamalian's The Cramoisy Queen restores to history the little-known Caresse Crosby, a remarkable woman whose efforts to promote the avant garde, civil rights, and world peace make her among the last century's most intriguing characters. A well-connected ‘pollen carrier’ of the experimental, Crosby seemed to know everyone, from Salvador Dali and Peggy Guggenheim to Romare Bearden and D. H. Lawrence. Hamalian gives us a backstage pass to their tantalizing world." —Alice Echols, author of Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks

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