Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970)[1] was the recipient of a patent for the first successful modern bra,[2] an American patron of the arts, a publisher, and the woman Time called the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris.

"[3] She and her second husband, Harry Crosby, founded the Black Sun Press, which was instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many authors who would later become famous, among them Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Hart Crane, and Robert Duncan.

[6] Polly's family was not fabulously rich, but her father had been raised, as she put it, "to ride to hounds, sail boats, and lead cotillions," and he lived extravagantly.

"[8] Her family divided its time between estates in Manhattan at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, in Watertown, Connecticut, and in New Rochelle, New York, and she enjoyed the advantages of an upper-class lifestyle.

Their second child, a daughter, Polleen Wheatland ("Polly"), was born on August 12, 1917, but Peabody was already in Officers Training Camp at Plattsburgh, New York, where he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery.

Crosby found he had only three real interests, all acquired at Harvard: to play, to drink, and to turn out, at any hour, to chase after fire engines and watch buildings burn.

The catalyst for Polly Jacob Peabody's transformation was her introduction and eventual marriage to Harry Crosby, a wealthy scion of a socially prominent Boston family, and another veteran and victim of the recent war.

Crosby wrote in his journal, "Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover when it's too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

Harry was 22, of slight build, with an unusual blonde hair style, a pale complexion, a weak constitution, a consuming gaze and enormous charisma.

Polly's mother insisted that she stop seeing Crosby for six months to avoid complete rejection by her society peers, a condition she agreed to, and she left Boston for New York.

They settled into an apartment at 12, Quai d'Orléans on Île St-Louis, and Caresse donned her red bathing suit and rowed Harry down the river to the Place de la Concorde, where he walked the last few blocks to the bank.

They first smoked opium together in Africa, and when their friend Constance Crowninshield Coolidge knocked on their door late one evening, they jumped at her invitation to join her at Drosso's apartment.

[35] After about a year, Harry soon tired of the predictable banker's life and quit, fully joining the Lost Generation of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the restrictive atmosphere of 1920s America.

On special occasions she wore an evening suit made of gold fabric, featuring a short skirt tailored by Vionnet, one of the most important Parisian fashion icons.

[5]: 66  Occasionally they were swingers together, as when they met two other couples and drove to the country near Bois de Boulogne, drew the cars into a circle with their headlights on, and changed partners.

The men found they shared an interest in photography, and they spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Harry and Caresse's home, Le Moulin du Soleil.

[40] In 1931, two years after Harry's suicide, the end of his affair with Caresse Crosby left Cartier-Bresson broken-hearted, and he escaped to Ivory Coast of French colonial Africa.

In 1928, Éditions Narcisse published a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe with illustrations by Alastair.

When their car broke down, she accidentally discovered Hampton Manor, a Hereford cattle farm with a dilapidated brick mansion on a 486 acres (197 ha) estate in Bowling Green, Virginia.

John Hampton was the brother of Virginia Legislator Daniel Coleman DeJarnette, Sr.[49] On September 30, 1936, she wrote to the New York Trust Company and instructed them to send 433 shares of stock that she used to buy the property, which was in need of renovation.

[10] Desperate for cash, Miller fell to churning out erotica on commission for an Oklahoma oil baron at a dollar per page, but after two 100-page stories that brought him US$200, he felt he could do no more.

In her journal, Nin wrote, "Harvey Breit, Robert Duncan, George Barker, Caresse Crosby, all of us concentrating our skills in a tour de force, supplying the old man with such an abundance of perverse felicities, that now he begged for more."

She maintained a doomed and troublesome romanticism about Harry Crosby, nurtured or inflamed by having participated in a decade or more of taking both intellectual and physical lovers in Paris during the 1920s.

[51] Other visitors included Max Ernst, Buckminster Fuller, Stuart Kaiser, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Ezra Pound, and other friends from her time in Paris.

[56] She secured contributions from a wide variety of well-known artists and writers, including: Louis Aragon, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling A.

Brown, Charles Bukowski, Albert Camus (Letter to a German Friend, his first appearance in an English-language publication), Henri Cartier-Bresson,[5]René Char, Paul Éluard, Jean Genet, Natalia Ginzburg, Victor Hugo, Weldon Kees, Robert Lowell, Henri Matisse, Henry Miller, Eugenio Montale, Anaïs Nin, Charles Olson, Pablo Picasso, Francis Ponge, Kenneth Rexroth, Arthur Rimbaud, Yannis Ritsos, Jean-Paul Sartre (The End of the War), Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Leo Tolstoy, and Giuseppe Ungaretti.

She traveled aboard a military British Overseas Airways Corporation flying boat as the sole civilian passenger, hand-carrying her Elsa Schiaparelli hat box that contained Pietro Lazzari's drawings of horses and Romare Bearden's Passion of Christ watercolor series.

Crosby continued her work to establish a world citizen's center in Delphi, Greece, where in 1942 she bought a small house that overlooked the Grove of Apollo.

Crosby traveled to Paris for his funeral, yet somehow making time for appearances at colleges where she gave talks about her life and the Black Sun Press.

[5] For a while Crosby divided her time between Rocca Sinibalda, which in the winter was cold and unlivable, a more practical residence in Rome, Hampton Manor in Bowling Green, Virginia, her home in Washington, D.C., and her sprawling apartment in New York City.