“Anyone who reads her will never forget her voice.” - Biographile

She’s been called first in many things - the first blogger, the first New Woman, the first female proto-surrealist, the first screen writer/star to break the fourth wall and directly address her audience (in 1917’s ground-breaking "Men Who Have Made Love to Me"). In her final book, Mary MacLane is the first media icon to destroy the celebrity distance and expose her inmost doubts, her hopes, her conflicted sexual history, the inner worlds of a creative personality - all in visionary prose unlike anything before or since.

With her first book - written in 1901 at age nineteen - she was hailed as a marvel by the likes of H.L. Mencken, Clarence Darrow, and Harriet Monroe. She went on to become a pioneering newswoman, gambler extraordinaire, and bon vivant, to influence Gertrude Stein, inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald, be puzzled over by Mark Twain, and upon her death in 1929 be eulogized as “an errant daughter of literature ... the first of the self-expressionists, and also the first of the Flappers,” as the creator of “that revolution in manners, that transvaluation of values in the female code of behavior known as the Roaring Twenties.”

This edition - fully annotated, with an illuminating introduction by Michael R. Brown, foremost MacLane scholar in the world today - conveys the full complexity and potency of Mary MacLane’s final self-expression.