Carman Barnes

Who is Carman Barnes?

Carman Dee Barnes was an American novelist.

Barnes was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the daughter of James Hunter Neal and poet and folklorist Lois Diantha Mills. Her last name is that of her first stepfather, Wellington Barnes, founder of the Dixie-Portland Cement Company, who died in 1927. Her mother later married musicologist and Vanderbilt University professor George Pullen Jackson. Barnes attended the Girls' Preparatory School in Chattanooga, the Ward-Belmont School for Girls in Nashville, Tennessee, and the Gardner School in New York City.

Barnes was only sixteen years old when her debut novel, Schoolgirl, was published in 1929. Based on Barnes' own experience at a boarding school for girls, the novel detailed the sexual experimentation, including lesbianism, of Naomi Bradshaw and her fellow students. The scandalous novel was a best seller internationally and got Barnes expelled from the Gardner School when her principal read it. Barnes and dramatist Alfonso Washington Pezet adapted the novel for the stage and it debuted at the Ritz Theatre on Barnes' eighteenth birthday. Starring Joanna Roos as Bradshaw, it was considered a flop and ran only 28 performances.