Louise Varèse

(1890 - 1989)

Born in Pittsburgh, the writer and translator Louise McCutcheon left Smith College before graduating in 1911 and married the editor Allen Norton; the couple started the magazine Rogue, a Dada-influenced New York avant-garde literary magazine that published in 1915 and 1916. She wrote a defense of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in another Dada magazine after the urinal was not included in a Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1917. (Theories abound about her role in the work’s submission.) She wrote a biography of her second husband, the composer Edgard Varèse, and translated the works of Marcel Proust, Stendhal, Arthur Rimbaud, and other French writers. Varèse died at the age of ninety-eight in Eugene, Oregon.