The Sunwise Turn, A Modern Bookshop was a bookshop in New York City that served as a literary salon and gathering-place for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim, Peggy Guggenheim (an intern in 1920), Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Harold Loeb, John Dos Passos and others. [1] It was founded by Madge Jenison and Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clarke in 1916, and operated until 1927. As such, it is one of the first bookshops in America to be owned and operated by women. [2] Its papers — those of its founders and of the bookshop itself — are held by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. [3]
The bookshop showed art as well as books; Guggenheim credited the shop with spurring her love of collecting. [4]
In addition to acting as an exhibition and performance space, the shop published five illustrated poetry broadsides and at least ten books between 1916 - 1923.
The broadsides were the first publishing venture undertaken by the shop, and each paired an artist with a poet. Issued sequentially in 1916, the broadside series featured poems and hand-colored drawings:
1916 also saw the publication of Lord Dunsany's "A Night at an Inn" in conjunction with the Neighborhood Playhouse as "Neighborhood Playhouse Plays No. 1" [6]
The Sunwise Turn pioneered the publication of Indian contemporary writing in America with two collections by Ananda Coomaraswamy "The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays" and "Prayers and Epigrams." [7] [8]
The initial location was 2 East 31st Street; in 1919 the shop moved to the Yale Club building at 51 East 44th Street, where it remained until it closed in 1927. Mowbray-Clarke, with the help of Harold and Marjorie Content Loeb, bought Jenison out in 1919/1920. (Jenison would go on to publish an account of the shop's early years, Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling [E.P. Dutton, 1923]). When in 1927 it proved to be insolvent, Mowbray-Clarke sold the firm with its stock to Doubleday, Page & Co. for $5,000 (~$68,129 in 2022). [3]
Alan Alexander Milne was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as for children's poetry. Milne was primarily a playwright before the huge success of Winnie-the-Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both world wars, as a lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in the First World War and as a captain in the Home Guard in the Second World War.
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer known primarily for his short stories, though he also wrote poetry and non-fiction. His works include "The Gift of the Magi", "The Duplicity of Hargraves", and "The Ransom of Red Chief", as well as the novel Cabbages and Kings. Porter's stories are known for their naturalist observations, witty narration, and surprise endings.
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was a British writer and composer.
Carmel-by-the-Sea, commonly known simply as Carmel, is a city in Monterey County, California, located on the Central Coast of California. As of the 2020 census, the town had a total population of 3,220, down from 3,722 at the 2010 census. Situated on the Monterey Peninsula, Carmel is a popular tourist destination, known for its natural scenery and rich artistic history.
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector, bohemian, and socialite. Born to the wealthy New York City Guggenheim family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim collected art in Europe and America between 1938 and 1946. She exhibited this collection as she built it. In 1949, she settled in Venice, where she lived and exhibited her collection for the rest of her life. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a modern art museum on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy, and is one of the most visited attractions in Venice.
Laurence Housman was an English playwright, writer and illustrator whose career stretched from the 1890s to the 1950s. He studied art in London and worked largely as an illustrator during the first years of his career, before shifting focus to writing. He was a younger brother of the poet A. E. Housman and his sister and fellow activist in the women's suffrage movement was writer/illustrator Clemence Housman.
Ananda Kentish Muthu Coomaraswamy was a Ceylonese metaphysician, historian and a philosopher of Indian art who was an early interpreter of Indian culture to the West. In particular, he is described as "the groundbreaking theorist who was largely responsible for introducing ancient Indian art to the West".
Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.
Dora de Houghton Carrington, known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytton Strachey. From her time as an art student, she was known simply by her surname as she considered Dora to be "vulgar and sentimental". She was not well known as a painter during her lifetime, as she rarely exhibited and did not sign her work. She worked for a while at the Omega Workshops, and for the Hogarth Press, designing woodcuts.
Marjorie Content (1895–1984) was an American photographer from New York City active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime. Since the late 20th century, collectors and art historians have taken renewed interest in her work. Her photographs have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions.
William Grainge was an English antiquarian and poet, and a historian of Yorkshire. He was born into a farming family in Dishforth and grew up on Castiles Farm near Kirkby Malzeard in the North Riding of Yorkshire, where he studied the archaeological site beneath the farm buildings, now known as Cast Hills settlement. Although he left school at age 12, he educated himself well enough to become a clerk to a solicitors' firm in Boroughbridge. He later established a bookshop in Harrogate and published numerous books on local history and topography, besides publishing a number of anonymous poems and discourses about local natural history.
Egmont Hegel Arens was an American publisher of literature and art, and an industrial designer and commercial artist specializing in marketing and product packaging.
Albert Boni was co-founder of the publishing company Boni & Liveright and a pioneering publisher in paperbacks and book clubs.
John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke (1869–1953) was an American sculptor specializing in medals. Mowbray-Clarke was one of the organizers of the influential 1913 Armory Show in New York.
Mary Horgan Mowbray-Clarke (1874–1962) was an American art critic, writer, publisher, instructor, landscape architect, and the proprietor of The Sunwise Turn, a hotbed of artistic activity and anarchist political thought in New York City during the nineteen-teens and twenties. She was also the wife of John Frederick Mowbray-Clarke, a sculptor who helped organize of the influential 1913 Armory Show exhibition of modern art.
Madge Jenison (1874–1960) was an American author, activist, and bookstore owner. She wrote novels, short stories, cultural criticism, and scripts. Her father, Edward Spencer Jenison, was a prominent Chicago architect who helped rebuild the city after The Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Her sister, Nancy Blanche Jenison, was a pioneering woman physician.
Amy Clarke is an American singer-songwriter, pianist, experimental synth keyboardist, percussionist and activist. Classically trained, she is known for mixing acoustic piano and contemporary electronics, and features her lyrics and vocals over rock, jazz, tribal, and world rhythms. With a powerful and wide range, Clarke can flow from a cappella to acoustic piano and eclectic percussion, blending complex rhythms. She has been described as "accomplished" and "amazing." Robert Leggett wrote that "after listening ... it is very difficult to just sit idly by – the listener is compelled to get involved."
W.E. Hill was an American cartoonist and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th-century. He is best known for his weekly full-page illustration series "Among Us Mortals" published in the New York Tribune from 1916 to 1922, and for creating the most popular iteration of the optical illusion My Wife and My Mother-in-Law (1915).