‘Anyone interested in Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Feminism, or LGBTQ+ Studies, not to mention journalism, photography, and travel will find this book wildly fascinating. What a life! And what a great way Padraig Rooney has told it.’
Carlos Dews, editor of the Library of America’s Complete Works of Carson McCullers
‘Padraig Rooney is a born storyteller who charts the short but dramatic life of this beautiful, talented, and troubled Swiss-born writer. Rooney brilliantly communicates Schwarzenbach’s promise. Rebel Angel is a twentieth-century story that should not be missed.’
Mary V. Dearborn, author of Carson McCullers: A Life
THOMAS MANN called her “the ravaged angel.” Writer Carson McCullers fell for “the face of a Donatello.” Another laureate, Roger Martin du Gard, described her as an inconsolable angel. In Berlin’s lesbian bars of the 1930s, women were falling over each other to meet her.
Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach arrived in the United States in late August 1936 at the invitation of the American photographer Barbara Hamilton Wright. It was the first of three visits over the next five years, during which Annemarie reported on Roosevelt’s America for a variety of Swiss newspapers and illustrated magazines. Her first road trip through the Rust Belt was a success with her Swiss editors and the two women planned a second in the American South in the Fall of 1937.
Schwarzenbach Goes South, Swiss American Historical Review Volume 60, No. 2, June 2024
November 3, 1936 was a great day for America. As every citizen and voter knows, it commemorates some of the more important dates in America’s history, such as Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, the end of the Civil War, and perhaps also the Declaration of Independence. But those events are long past. The question now is whether Roosevelt will be re-elected…
Election Night in New York, 1936, translated by Padraig Rooney, swissinfo
My correspondent is a young twenty-two-year-old American, a writer who has become an overnight success since her prize-winning novel was chosen as Book of the Month. The book in question is a vibrant novel of 350 pages, constructed not so much around a narrative plot line as following a group of diverse characters, inhabitants of a dull little Southern town…
Carson McCullers in 1940, translated by Padraig Rooney, AGNI 84
Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s third and final visit to America in the summer and fall of 1940 quickly raised old demons. This time the woman in her life was Margot von Opel, a Baroness married to Fritz, a wealthy car manufacturer. When Germany invaded the Low Countries on 10 May, the three of them were mid-Atlantic on the Manhattan bound for New York.
Around eight o’ clock in the evening I noticed my Ford running on empty. Deep night beyond the windscreen. At this time of year, the sun sets early in New England and the hard winter throws up unrelenting blizzards and nor’easters, punctured by patches of mild damp air that give the illusion of early spring.
War had broken out. Written on board the Manhattan bound for New York, this short text illustrates Schwarzenbach’s wandering spirit, her trustafarian, romantic view of Asia as well as her lyrical gift. In New York her addiction and disorientation took a turn for the worse; she was committed to Bellevue psychiatric clinic and eventually expelled from the United States. She died in Switzerland in November 1942, from injuries sustained in a fall from her bicycle.
Westward Ho! (1940), translated by Padraig Rooney, Transnational Literature, Vol. 13, 2021
