Dorothy Richardson’s series-novel Pilgrimageruns to over 2,000 pages and 13 “chapter-volumes” and contains some of the most challenging English prose this side of Finnegans Wake. It’s also arguably the most neglected major work of 20th century English fiction. Despite its recognition as a major work, it’s not stocked in most bookshops in the U.K., available only as print on demand. And in the United States, it’s been out of print for over 40 years (until now).
I first read Pilgrimagein 2016 and wrote about the individual volumes and the experience overall on NeglectedBooks.com. It turned me into a champion of Pilgrimage, and in 2022, I organized a year-long group read, an effort supported through the ReadingPilgrimage.com website. It was such a rewarding experience that I immediately wanted to organize another. But I was put off by the fact that Pilgrimagewas out of print and hard to get in the U.S. After contacting numerous publishers without success, I decided to fix the problem myself. I purchased the U.S. rights to the chapter-volumes still under copyright from the Richardson Estate, and in collaboration with designer Louise Aspinall, I’ve now published a new U.S. edition of Pilgrimage, available for sale exclusively from Asterism Books.
Front covers of the Libroj Books edition of Pilgrimage.
This edition incorporates the texts of the respective first edition of each chapter-volume and is set in Caslon, the same typeface as the Duckworth editions of Richardson’s first ten books. It includes synopses of each chapter-volume and translations of the many French, German, and other foreign language phrases and references.
Quite honestly, I wish I hadn’t had to do this. Dorothy Richardson’s work deserves to be in print and as widely sold and read as that or Virginia Woolf or James Joyce. This edition is as much a sign of the irresponsibility of American publishers and American scholars of 20th Century literature as a sign of respect for Richardson and the importance of her achievement. Richardson’s protagonist, Miriam Henderson, deals with issues still deeply relevant today: earning a living; finding a place to live; getting along with roommates and employers; figuring out how sex fits in one’s life; shaping a way to “self-actualize” while holding down a job and keeping up with the demands of daily living; carving out an identity that isn’t defined (or constrained) by marriage or class or religion or gender. And Richardson’s vivid impressions and elliptical style means Pilgrimageis a text one can return to over and over and find new meanings from.
I hope this new edition of Pilgrimagehelps bring a new generation of readers to this revelatory work.
I started out simply spurred by the thrill of finding long-forgotten books and I started NeglectedBooks.com to share some of my discoveries. But I soon learned that behind every neglected book is a life worth discovering and celebrating, too. Here are some of the stories I’ve been privileged to tell:
Raised in circumstances of abject poverty, Kathleen Sully began writing novels in her forties—stories of violence, poverty, eccentricities, and stubborn originality. After initial acclaim, her followership dwindled, and she returned to a hard life, now as carer for her schizophrenic son. A writer still awaiting her deserved recognition.
Born Gerald Wilkinson in Bombay in 1910, raised Gerald Carberry by a father often on the run from his creditors and the law, Peter Greave (his pseudonym) contracted leprosy in the late 1930s and spent much of World War II in the slums of Calcutta suffering in squalor until he was brought to live at the last home for lepers in England. Though his memoirs are colorful and candid, I discovered more secrets to his story when I read through his surviving diaries.
Mary Britton Miller lost her parents to illness at the age of three. At 14, she watched her identical twin sister, Grace, drown when their rowboat overturned. Then, in her sixties, she published three novels as Isabel Bolton that earned her praise as “the best woman writer of fiction in this country today.” Yet her social comedies hid a vein of tragedy that marked her entire life.
Almost every day of his adult life—for over 80 years—Raymond Souster wrote poetry about his home town of Toronto, its people, its nature, and its history. The fifty-some collections of poems that he published represent a unique record of one city’s life, almost an impressionistic diary of one urban life in the 20th Century.
Back in 2009, I wrote about a forgotten little novel from 1937 about a man who falls off a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Now, almost 90 years later, Gentleman Overboardis becoming a global phenomenon, translated into ten different languages and adapted into one-person plays in Switzerland and Italy. This is the story of its author, who fell out of his own life and disappeared thinking he would never be read again.
Rod McKuen was one of the most successful writers of his time, and certainly its best-selling poet. But how much of his life and his work was a sham? The answer turns out to be more complicated than you might imagine.
Jessamy Morrison published six novels about odd and unconventional sexual relationships in England in the 1960s. But who exactly was Jessamy Morrison? With the help of a couple other sleuths, I was able to identify the unexpected man behind her work: the Anglo-Hungarian novelist Peter de Polnay.
Adele Garrison wrote a novel called Revelations of a Wifeover the course of forty years, a total work estimated at over 13 million words. And the reason you’ve never heard of her, or it, is because virtually none of her novel has ever been published in book form. Revelations of a Wifewas a newspaper serial.
The American writer Eda Lord met Sybille Bedford, a German writer, in the early 1930s and they began a long-term relationship. But when Bedford fled to America, leaving Lord behind to survive the Nazi occupation of France, it cast a shadow that haunted Lord for the rest of her life.
Why Read About Virginia Faulkner?
This video offers 10 good reasons to read about this woman you’ve never heard of.
Why “A Life in Two Acts”?
Virginia Faulkner, age 21, in New York City. From Town and Country magazine, 1934.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Virginia Faulkner came close to proving that true. With two bestselling comic novels—Friends and Romans(1934) and The Barbarians (1935)—to her name by the age of 22, Virginia Faulkner was called the “next Dorothy Parker,” and her wise-cracking quips were quoted in gossip columns around the country. Finding herself married to a stranger after a wild night out with Tallulah Bankhead, she headed to Hollywood, where she spent as much time becoming a fixture of the queer community, even enticing Greta Garbo out of her legendary seclusion for one party, than she did working on scripts.
When she returned to New York, she invented her greatest comic character, the gate-crasher extraordinaire Princess Tulip Murphy, entertaining readers throughout World War Two with her excursions to everywhere from the North Pole to Mexico to Hell. She fell in love with the Tin Pan Alley songwriter Dana Suesse, but when the play they wrote together bombed after a week on Broadway, she had a breakdown and spent much of the next two years in and out of sanatoriums where she received multiple doses of electroshock therapy. While recovering, she ghostwrote the autobiography of her old friend, the notorious Jazz Age madam Polly Adler, though she received no credit for the resulting bestseller, A House is Not a Home.
Broke, without prospects, and struggling with alcoholism when she returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska in 1955, she could easily have descended into the early end as Fitzgerald. Instead, offered the job of assembling a commemorative anthology for Nebraska, she discovered her genius for editing – and recognized her opportunity to put her energies to work in the cause of resurrecting the work and legacy of Nebraska’s greatest writer, Willa Cather. With her partner, the poet and scholar Bernice Slote, she spent the next 25 years in the service of Cather, academic publishing, and western American literature, working until her last day on scholarly editions of books by and about Willa Cather.
Virginia Faulkner with University of Nebraska Press director Bruce Nicoll, 1967.
Why Write About Virginia Faulkner?
I first became interested in Virginia Faulkner after reading her Princess Tulip book, My Hey-Day(1940). When I looked up her biography, as is often my habit with neglected writers, I was confused to find that she ended her career as an editor with the University of Nebraska Press: how to connect the dots between the sophisticated comic writer of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Later, when doing a little more research, I was sent a PDF full of letters she wrote her brother Eddie in the early 1930s. In one prescient letter from 1934, just after selling her first book, Friends and Romans, to Simon & Schuster, she confided, “If I’m ever really going to be any good, I’ll have to give up this smart, know-it-all line for something a little kinder and truer.” But as became clear, she found the demand for her wise-crack-filled stories (and the money that came with them) too hard to resist. Always thinking she could move into more serious writing, she found herself instead adrift after Dana Suesse left to study composition.
Moving back to Lincoln—literally moving into her childhood bedroom at first, in fact—was undoubtedly a humiliating experience. But in the course of the next few years, she found work that for the first time truly inspired her. And as countless authors who worked with her attest, she was a brilliant, if demanding, editor. That left-turn that first confused me turned out to be an act of reinvention and recovery, a deliberate decision to step away from the glitz, glamour, and money of New York City and back to the grassroots values of Nebraska—a place she couldn’t wait to escape from when she was twenty.
A collection of photographs and other images from Virginia Faulkner’s life, including some not found in the book. A browse through this album will give you some idea of the diversity of events and personalities in Virginia’s story.
Praise for Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts:
“Intimidating, brilliant, and scathingly funny, Virginia Faulkner is a true American original. She fled her corn-fed Midwestern childhood in 1928 and reinvented herself as an international sophisticate and renowned wit. . . . Famous for her impeccable taste and stubborn eccentricities, Faulkner masterminded the literary reputations of authors ranging from Polly Adler to Willa Cather, but her own fascinating story has been forgotten until now. Brad Bigelow brings this complex, trailblazing woman back to life and restores her to her rightful place in American history.”—Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winner and author of Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
I was gripped. The writing is really sharp. I couldn’t believe the level of compression and the types of details that Bigelow managed…. He gave the illusion that he knew absolutely everything about her life. And as a portrait of both life in a midwestern university town and life in mid-century academia, it was superb. The book read like a novel. It was honestly a lot like reading Stoner, because it was suffused with the same kind of quiet melancholy. But…in the end, there was more hope and more joy. I think, ultimately, it was a good life. It’s a life to be proud of. — Naomi Kanakia, author of The Default World and What’s So Great About The Great Books
“Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts is a fascinating tribute to literary obsession. Not only does Brad Bigelow offer a captivating tale of Virginia Faulkner’s mad devotion to Willa Cather; he provides a portrait of how profoundly one scholar, one editor, can amplify one writer’s voice.”—Timothy Schaffert, author of The Titanic Survivors Book Club and The Perfume Thief
“I’m a bit embarrassed to confess that I’d never even heard of Virginia Faulkner before I met her in this engrossing biography, and now I wish I could have met her in person.”—Nancy Pearl, author of the best-selling Book Lust and More Book Lust
“This is a tale of struggle, uncertainty, and commitment, but it is mostly one of triumph. Brad Bigelow brings Virginia Faulkner and her partner, the distinguished, pathbreaking Willa Cather scholar Bernice Slote, alive on the page. This biography is a significant contribution.”—Robert Thacker, historical editor of Willa Cather’s Complete Poems and author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives; A Biography
“An illuminating biography of Faulkner. Her life was nothing short of extraordinary. How perfectly fitting it is, then, to have her life’s story told by an extraordinary biographer.” — Andrew Guschausky, Big Sky Journal
“In this impeccably researched and entertaining biography, Virginia Faulkner emerges as a waspish, Dorothy Parker–like novelist and newspaper columnist, whose glamorous (if sometimes rackety) life has the makings of a Hollywood motion picture. In pages of lucid prose, Brad Bigelow does this neglected American writer full justice. Terrific.”—Ian Thomson, author of Primo Levi: A Life and Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End
Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts by Brad Bigelow Published by: Bison Books 280 Pages, 23 photographs Hardcover 9781496230621 Publication date: January 2026 Available now
I am currently working on a book about the many connections between the literary world of New York City and the world of Hollywood during the Pre-Code era (1929-1934). Hollywood before the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code is still notorious for its frank treatment of sex, crime, and other vices. What’s little known, however, is how much Hollywood relied on the New York literary establishment for its material. Between 1929 and 1934, three out of four Hollywood movies were based on novels, magazine stories, or plays published or produced in New York. New York provided not just the material but the subjects: what was news in Manhattan often showed up on cinema screens around the country a few months later.
I want to tell the stories of the writers who fed Hollywood’s hunger: not the screenwriters, who’ve long been studied, but the novelists, storytellers, and playwrights whose words filled the soundtracks of these early talkies. Writers like Grace Perkins and Fulton Oursler, who wrote under four different names and contributed the stories for five different films in 1931 alone. Writers like Katharine Brush and Faith Baldwin, whose stories of working women and their struggles to get past stereotypes like “the office wife” made them some of the highest-paid writers in America and provided roles for the likes of Mary Astor, Joan Blondell, and Loretta Young. Writers like Jack Lait and Donald Henderson Clarke, who parlayed their street knowledge from years as New York reporters into hard-hitting novels about racketeers, corrupt cops, and fallen women. Writers whose fame earned them billing ahead of stars like Edward G. Robinson and Cary Grant.
Hollywood and literary New York have never been as intertwined as they were during these five short years and I want to show the many threads that connected them, including such the Gold Diggers of Broadway novel that Eve Bernstein of Warner Brothers wrote for newspaper serialization, the bookmarks that Brentano’s bookstore gave out as tie-ins to the Constance Bennett movie Bought, and The Trial of Mary Dugan, the play Bayard Veiller wrote based on the Peaches and “Daddy” Browning case that was a hit on Broadway, toured the U.S., made into a film starring Norma Shearer, and then published as a novel by Photoplay magazine.
I’ve written about some of these books on NeglectedBooks.com:
Basis of the 1933 film The Woman Accused starring Nancy Carroll and Cary Grant
Other projects in development:
Peter Greave’s Secrets: A selection of the diaries of the British writer and leprosy victim. Before leaving the UK in 2021, I photographed the three dozen notebooks that remain of the diary kept by Peter Greave (born Herbert Carberry) from the late 1930s to late 1960s
My Father’s Records: a memoir told through the prism of the Space Age Pop and other records in my father’s collection, my first exposures to music
Failures: The group biography of six neglected writers, the proposal for which was short-listed for the 2020 Tony Lothian Prize
Future
2026
October 2-November 6: “Pre-Code Films Part Two: Songs, Laughs, Scares, Etc.,” Montana Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (MOLLI), Missoula, MT
Past
2026
June 6: “The Passing Show”: Panel discussion at the 71st Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference
April 3 – May 15: “Decoding The Great Gatsby,” Montana Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (MOLLI), Missoula, MT
“Lest We Forget”: An essay on My Name is Million, a memoir of the German invasion of Poland by Martin Hare (Zoe Girling), in Slightly Foxed Issue 75 (2022)
My Wikipedia contributions, which focus on biographies of neglected writers, are listed under the user name Spaceagepop.
My papers on cyberspace security and project management can be found on Google Scholar.
I spent much of my working life dreaming of the day when I could devote my time and energy to my love of literature.
I grew up as an Air Force brat, living in various places around the U.S. and in Italy as a child, and I entered the Air Force myself after graduating from the University of Washington in 1980 with degrees in math and English. I spent 25 years as an Air Force officer, serving in communications, space, and cyberwarfare positions. I then worked as a NATO civil servant, ending as the principal technical advisor at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).
After retiring from NATO, I took the MA Biography/Creative Nonfiction programme at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a first in 2020 as the Lorna Sage Prize winner. In the same year, I was short-listed for the Tony Lothian Award from the Biographers’ Club. While at UEA, I became involved with the UEA Publishing Project and began editing the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press and, as of May 2025, have brought 16 superb and long-forgotten books back to print, with introductions by such notable writers as Vivian Gornick, George Szirtes, Jonathan Coe, Catherine Taylor, Louisa Treger, Terese Svoboda, and Joanna Pocock.
In 2022, I led a year-long reading group for Dorothy Richardson’s series-novel Pilgrimage and created Reading Pilgrimage to support readers of Richardson’s work. My passion for this remarkable and underappreciated work led me to obtain the permissions for the chapter-volumes still under copyright, and in July 2025, I published the first complete U.S. edition of Pilgrimage in almost 50 years through Libroj Books. This set is now available for sale exclusively from Asterism Books.
I also organized year-long reading groups and created websites to support them: Wafer-Thin Books (2024); and MusicofTime.com, for the 2025 read of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time series. Between 1996 and 2006, I wrote the hundreds of articles about exotica, easy listening, and other types of oddball music on SpaceAgePop.com, which is still online though no longer actively updated.
From time to time, I speak and teach on culture, literature, and project management. These appearances can be found under Events.
