Discipline: Literature

Iris Owens

Discipline: Literature
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1983, 1985
Iris Owens (1929-2002), also known by her pseudonym Harriet Daimler, was an American novelist. During the 1950s she lived in Paris, where she was associated with the group of expatriate writers who produced the literary review Merlin, among them Alexander Trocchi, Christopher Logue, John Stevenson, George Plimpton, and Richard Seaver. Like Trocchi and Logue, she earned money writing erotic novels for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press. Owens's four Olympia Press novels, along with a fifth that she coauthored, were published under her pseudonym. Owens returned to New York in the 1960s and remained there until her death. Under her own name she published two more novels, the first of which, After Claude, was published in 1973 and reissued in 2010 in the New York Review of Books NYRB Classics series. The second was Hope Diamond Refuses, published in 1984.

Studios

New Jersey

Iris Owens worked in the New Jersey studio.

The yellow clapboard New Jersey Studio, located on a grassy, sloping site, was funded by the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and built as an exact replica of Monday Music Studio (1913). The studio’s porch rests on fieldstone piers that increase in height as the ground slopes to the west. Like Monday Music Studio, New Jersey…

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