Caresse Crosby was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra. She and her second husband, Harry Crosby, founded the Black Sun Press. Crosby’s parents, William Hearn Jacob and Mary Jacob, were both descended from American colonial families. Her family was descended from a prominent New England family,: 1 Puritans.
About Caresse Crosby in brief
Caresse Crosby was the first recipient of a patent for the modern bra. 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. Crosby’s parents, William Hearn Jacob and Mary Jacob, were both descended from American colonial families. She died of pneumonia related to heart disease in Rome, in 1970, at the age of 79. Her family was descended from a prominent New England family,: 1 Puritans. On her mother’s side her seventh great-grandfather, William Phelps, departed from Plymouth, England in 1630 and founded Dorchester, Boston. She was the granddaughter of General Walter Phelps, who commanded troops at the Civil War Battle of Antietam. In 1914, she was presented to the King of England at a garden party in the style of the American aristocratic style. She grew up in Manhattan at 59th Street and Watertown, Connecticut, in a family divided between estates in Manhattan and on the Upper East Side. She later said, ‘What I wanted was a world where only good smells existed’. She was a rather uninterested student rather than uninterested in books, but she was unafraid to try new things. She had an open marriage with numerous ongoing affairs, a suicide pact, frequent drug use, wild parties, and long trips abroad. In 1929, one of her husband’s affairs culminated in his death as part of a murder-suicide or double suicide.
She founded Women Against War and continued, after World War II, to try to establish a Center for World Peace at Delphi, Greece. When rebuffed by Greek authorities, she purchased Castello di Rocca Sinibalda, a 15th-century castle north of Rome, which she used to support an artists’ colony. In 1925, they began publishing their own poetry as Éditions Narcisse in exquisitely printed, limited-edition volumes. In 1927, they re-christened the business as the BlackSun Press. In 1936, she left Europe in 1936 and married Selbert Young, an unemployed, alcoholic actor 16 years her junior. She moved to Washington, D. C. and began a long-term love affair with black actor-boxer Canada Lee, despite the threat of miscegenation laws. She was nicknamed ‘Polly’ to distinguish her from her mother. Her husband’s death was marked by scandal as the newspapers speculated wildly about whether Harry shot his lover or not. Caresse returned to Paris, where she continued to run the Blacksun Press. She lived in Paris until her death in 1970 at age 79. She wrote that for the most part of her life in New York, she lived in dreams, rather than in reality. She said: ‘I wanted to ride to hounds to sail and lead boats, and he lived and he led me to cotillions’
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This page is based on the article Caresse Crosby published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
