Carolyn Burke

Carolyn Burke is a biographer, critic, translator, and scholar whose books recover the lives of artists working across national and artistic boundaries. Becoming Modern follows the poet and visual artist Mina Loy through London, Paris, Florence, New York, Mexico, and the changing avant-garde communities of the early twentieth century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux first published the biography in 1996. Burke connects Loy's experiments in poetry and art with Futurism, Dada, modernist friendships, and the repeated reinvention of her public identity. Her later biographies include Lee Miller: A Life and No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, while Foursome studies Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Rebecca Salsbury. Becoming Modern established the method visible across these works: close attention to archives, artistic networks, travel, and the choices through which creative people shaped both their work and their remembered lives.