SOURCE: "'The Most Famous Unknown in the World'—Remembering Djuna Barnes," in New York Times, December 1, 1985, p. 3.

In the following essay, Giroux discusses his experience as an editor working with Djuna Barnes.

"You have to trust someone, Miss Barnes. Why not trust me?" Only an author as aggravating as Djuna Barnes could have goaded me into making such a desperate plea, during a meeting in our publishing office. I was unaware I had nearly shouted these words until my assistant, in the outer room, repeated them to me. "Do you think she trusts you now?" she asked after Miss Barnes's departure. "Did it work?" Of course it didn't work. Nothing worked with Djuna Barnes, whose distrust of all book publishers seemed to be pathological, the product of her long and unhappy history with many companies here and abroad. She even rejected the word "publishers"; they were "printers" to...