She was so gifted a writer that W.H. Auden said of her: “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.” She was so elegantly beautiful that the Dadaist artist Man Ray begged to photograph her, fascinated as he was…

    There is an old Italian saying O mangi questa minestra o salti dalla finestra. That roughly translates to “Eat the soup or jump out of the window”–an exclamation for those times when inaction is off the table and you just have to do something–anything. Take it…