Caresse Crosby

Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970) was the recipient of a patent for the first successful modern bra, 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." 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. Early life and education Born on April 20, 1891, in New Rochelle, New York, she was the oldest child of Mary (née Phelps) Jacob and William Hearn Jacob, who were both descended from American colonial families—her mother from the William Phelps family, and her father from the Van Rensselaers. Her mother was the daughter of Civil War General Walter Phelps, and she had two brothers, Leonard and Walter "Bud" Phelps Jacob. She was nicknamed "Polly" to distinguish her from her mother. 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. In 1914, the family presented her to the King of England at a garden party. In keeping with the American aristocratic style of the times, she was even photographed as a child by Charles Dana Gibson, for whom the iconic term "Gibson girl" was coined. She grew up, she later said, "in a world where only good smells existed. What I wanted usually came to pass." She was an uninterested student. Author Geoffrey Wolff wrote that for the most part Polly "lived her life in dreams."