As Elaine Kraf's The Princess of 72nd Street is added to the Penguin Modern Classics roster, Kat Lister re-examines the author's legacy and talks to Kraf's daughter about putting together the pieces of the life of one of the most neglected and most radical novelists of the 1970s
Around thirty pages into Elaine Kraf’s 1979 novella, The Princess of 72nd Street, we encounter our narrator, Ellen, riding up and down in her apartment elevator, embracing anyone who enters it: “sweet people, the mean ones, old, young, the pushers, heroin addicts, cocaine snorters, drunks, married men.” In Ellen’s eyes, this ordinary lift has been transformed into a magical box “with blue lights gleaming from its roof and walls of flaming orange.” It is, on this particular evening, a conduit to another world, another way of being. Until, that is, she wakes up the next morning with bruises and memory gaps and a cue card pinned to her fridge that reads: DON’T LET STRANGE MEN INTO YOUR APARTMENT. “I wonder, “ she ponders her handwriting, “what I really meant.”
And so begins Kraf’s prismatic take on female agency and mental health – now declared to be “a lost classic for fans of Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick”. As the American author Melissa Broder asks in her introduction to Penguin Classics’ latest edition of The Princess of 72nd Street: “Who is entitled to hold power over the inner world of another? What defines sanity?” While we’re posing these kinds of questions: what defines liberation? For Ellen, a mentally unstable artist living alone (and possibly with bipolar disorder – although it’s never disclosed) in New York, the answers are never clear-cut as she battles to live life on her own terms in a world that seeks to diminish it.
At the centre of this tug-of-war are her “radiances”: kaleidoscopic bursts of manic energy that transform her neighbourhood on the Upper West Side into a joyful kingdom she resides over as Princess Esmeralda. During one of these synesthetic highs, she sees drifts of blue circles and large orange flowers; during another, hissing waves that run over her toes, the floor turning to white sand. In the midst of all this colour and glow, Ellen gleefully topless dances to the beat of her own drum. And her subjects on 72nd street, “the people who elected me,” are all nonconformists, too: “men standing on corners half asleep with drugs, the proprietors of small grocery stores, the Argentinian pianist who sells records.” For Esmeralda at the centre of all this, her radiances – at least, at the time she is experiencing them – are her strength. But for those around her – mostly a revolving cast of deranged and inadequate men who tumble in and out of her bed – they are her shame, something to repress and control.
That this feminist classic was written with such visionary abandon, and that its author should then disappear from view, never to publish again, only adds to the cult mystique surrounding Kraf 45 years later. How did the author of four novels – I Am Clarence (1969), The House of Madelaine (1971), Find Him! (1977) and The Princess of 72nd Street (1979) – end up with only a 250-word Wikipedia page, and three of these novels now out of print?
“Even as her daughter, I’m still putting together the pieces of the puzzle,” Kraf’s only child, Milena Kraf Altman, admits on a video call from her home in New York. “For the longest time I just thought of her as ‘mom’ and I never got to fully understand her as a writer.” But when Kraf died in 2013, at the age of 77, Altman discovered a storage unit crammed full of her poems, diaries and stories. She has since been reading them, little by little, to understand her mother’s life in the 1970s better, using those words to fill in the gaps she left behind.
Kraf, Altman tells me, was born in the Bronx, in 1936, the daughter of a New York senator. An academically bright child, by the age of sixteen she had already graduated from high school, and, against her parents wishes, chose to go to art college. The willfulness she displayed in her teenage years would soon find its way onto the writing page with her simultaneous fragile-yet-strong-willed female characters. In other words: women on the periphery of what is considered ‘normal’. What does it mean to be deemed mentally unstable in a world that too-often appears mentally unstable itself? It’s a theme she would return to again and again, beginning with her first novel, I Am Clarence, a story that, like The Princess of 72nd Street, would deconstruct the relationship between a mentally ill woman and the patriarchal forces that meddle and interfere with her. In the case of her debut, a deteriorating mother struggles to love and care for her disabled child against a backdrop of cruel jibes, crass doctors, and self-seeking lovers. “When a novelist tells a good story well, it becomes a good novel,” a New York Times reviewer wrote upon the publication of I Am Clarence in 1969. “When a novelist uses words as if they were a sacred love, what he writes becomes poetry.”
Or should we now amend: what she wrote became poetry. And yet despite a decade of bold and beautiful writing: “she had a lot of issues getting noticed,” Altman says. When she was, she could sometimes be misunderstood. “Elaine Kraf’s Find Him! had me confused at times as to the significance of its collage-like bits and pieces, but left no doubt as to her gifts as a stylist,” one reviewer wrote of her third novel in 1977. The mixed feedback frustrated her, Altman tells me. As did her struggles to get published. In a letter she has since found in her mother’s storage unit, Kraf writes that things would have been easier if she’d been a man. “A lot of women back then were being encouraged to put their names as men in order to get published,” Altman expands. Although her first two novels were put out by the corporate might of Doubleday, her last two would be supported by the smaller indies Fiction Collective and New Directions. But when Kraf’s agent passed away shortly after The Princess of 72nd Street was published, things became harder to navigate as an avant-garde writer, and despite her keenness to keep writing, she wouldn’t be published again.
“There was a pile of unpublished novels”, Altman recalls of her childhood home in the 90s. “Next to that, a pile of rejection letters.” What’s more: “The rejection letters were very harsh – and usually written by men.” Hearing about Kraf’s determination to live a creatively autonomous life within the confines of a rigidly patriarchal framework, I am reminded of the fictional women she so vividly brought to life, full of desire and self-awareness and will. “Who are they to pass judgement anyhow?” a doubtful Ellen asks as her seventh radiance wilts and dissipates in The Princess of 72nd Street. “Aren’t these my streets?” On the one hand we have Ellen: a narrator that Kraf once described as “very critical and conservative.” On the other hand, Esmeralda: “who is free and doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her.” And yet: “They are both a part of the same person, often at odds with each other.” It’s a Janus-like creation, the one woman nestled inside the other like Russian dolls – and an innovative one. Now Kraf is being republished, it’s almost like we’re finally catching up with her pioneering mind, a few steps behind.
“She was so driven,” Altman pays tribute to that mind. “Not just in her writing, but in everything she did.” Her painting, for instance, which led her out into the city where “she would find drawers on the street and that would be her canvas.” Then in the 1980s, she became a principal of a special-education school, and so began another chapter in her life. “She instilled this notion in me that you reinvent yourself every few years. You don’t have to be set in one thing that you do.” Although she would always be a painter to Altman: “The evolution of who she was was never set.” Which is what makes her reappraisal in 2025 all the more apt. This summer, Penguin Modern Classics will republish I Am Clarence for the next generation of readers. But perhaps the most thrilling news is that there are potentially more stories yet to come. Altman’s favourite of her mother’s novels is yet to be published, she tells me. “There’s a lot more powerful work that I would love for the world to see.”
As for the ones that are already out there, the feeling, for Altman, is a joyful one. “I’m ecstatic by it, to see other people digest her work in whatever way they interpret it, it’s the conversation she [Kraf] always hoped for.” What’s more, as the world lurches further to the far-right, Kraf’s third eye on female liberation makes her writing as vital as ever. The one woman nestled inside the other – with her eyes looking up at the sun. For as Ellen puts it, the sun is the only entity that understands her. “It roars its comprehension of everything I am.”
Blue
Lights Gleaming & Walls of Flaming Orange: The Lost Novels of
Elaine Kraf. By Kat Lister. The Quietus, January 18, 2025.
According to my feed, the book of the summer is a tie between Miranda July’s sexy midlife-crisis drama, All Fours; the new Sally Rooney galley; and a slim experimental novel published in 1979. Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street lyrically details the seventh “radiance” experienced by a young figure painter named Ellen who, during fits of seeming psychosis, believes herself to be the sovereign ruler of West 72nd between Broadway and Central Park. Ellen/Princess Esmerelda makes witty observations about creativity, femininity, and public life with a voice that feels startlingly modern: Of Eastside men flirting with her kingdom’s subjects, she says, “We don’t like to be bullied by slick strangers in Gucci jeans.”
Kraf died in 2013, but her fourth and final book lives on — recommended on Twitter by critic Lauren Oyler, snapped on Stories by Substack darling Rayne Fisher-Quann. 45 years since it was first published and two years since writer Hannah Williams dubbed it "a true underappreciated classic" in the New Yorker, The Princess of 72nd Strret gets a reissue from Random House, out August 6. It includes an introduction by Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley, Milk Fed, and the iconic millennial-malaise essay collection So Sad Today, born of her Twitter account that catalogs such bangers as “am i an independent woman or just scared of everyone and isolated.” A veritable expert on writing from the perspective of the afflicted woman, Broder tells NYLON why The Princess of 72nd Street should be in the pantheon of mental-illness fiction.
When did you first read The Princess of 72nd Street?
I get asked about blurbing things four or five times a week and probably only blurb four to six books a year. I have this reflexive electric fence up because I need to do my own reading. If I blurb something, I have to love it, and I have to read the whole book. Less often am I asked to write an introduction. As soon as I started [The Princess of 72nd Street], I was like, “Yes, this is a text I want to grapple with.”
What details hooked you? I could not stop thinking about the woman who only wants to paint still-lifes of plums and her husband who has banished plums from their life.
I had never read a manic episode described so beautifully. The book is asking very interesting questions about personal freedom and self-governance, and the line between mental health and spirituality. But as a work of literature on an imagistic level, she’s describing these orange flowers growing from her body and joy cracking out of her every pore, or petal, or cell. There’s self-awareness, but at the same time, you can get lost in the beatific imagery of the experience. I also love the humor and the innate competition that’s going on between men and women, and the particular competition that can come within an artist’s relationship – which is what the plum thing is about.
It’s a story about artists not making art.
Romantic obsession is the same creative energy that we can channel into art. I think that love is an act of creation, too. But it’s very easy, if you have an active imagination, to treat other human beings as a blank canvas and project whatever we want to see onto them. Or to turn that inwards.
Do you experience obsession as a creative block?
When an artist isn’t obsessing about their work, we have a tendency to obsess about ourselves. This book came to me when I had just come out of a period of triple grief. My father had died, I lost an ex to suicide, and then a friend to suicide. I wasn’t really writing that much. I had canceled my Death Valley book tour. I was really obsessing about my own mental health and a lot of my creative energy was going toward trying to fix it. One thing that I identified with in the Princess is, while she is not trying to control her manic visions — she loves her manic visions and her internal experience — she is trying to establish a protocol for how she can live in this state without ending up in the hospital again. She has all kinds of rules for herself and those rules become progressively more elaborate. One might say that some of that obsessing over rules could be put towards her art.
“This woman is shapeshifting. She doesn’t have a stable concept of self – which, like, who does?”
The word “mania” doesn’t actually appear in the book. Do you think of the Princess as “bipolar” or diagnose her with some other modern medical term?
Let's put it this way: She does have manic episodes. And when they end, or if she’s given Thorazine, she does fall into a depression. So we can call that what we may. She describes mania as “full of radiance and flooded with a feeling of small bells ringing and showers of light.” Depression she describes as a pit. There’s a comedown, and the comedown is extremely painful. That is very true to life.
Why does it feel so rare and remarkable among our wellspring of contemporary writing on mental illness to feel like the Princess is a trustworthy narrator?
There are some readers who might say, “How can we trust her?” She’s having visions. She's describing herself as a ballerina, a saint, a mother, a mystic, an ethereal spirit, an Earth goddess. This woman is shapeshifting. She doesn’t have a stable concept of self – which, like, who does? Let’s be real about that fact. What is reliable is that the Princess is committed to telling the truth as she sees it. She’s not hiding anything. We are with her. We are on her side. We are in her head. Even if her view might not be “consensual reality,” her honesty is to be trusted as to her own experience.
Her honesty is what all her boyfriends find so jarring about her within the text. What do you think about the way that Kraf wrote men?
The men don’t come out very well. We’ve got Auriel, the illusionist who she’s madly in love with who then fakes his suicide. We’ve got Peter, the painter who has an emotional allergy to plums because he fears his girlfriend’s success. We’ve got her ex-husband, Adolphe, who is also an egomaniacal artist who has numerous breakdowns when his work involving traffic lights is declared unoriginal. She’s under the thumb of her ex-boyfriend George, who, when she was with him, prohibited laughter and singing and sent her to quite possibly the worst man of all in the book: the psychiatrist, Dr. Clufftrain, who’s totally batshit. He sees patients 21 hours a day and has no boundaries. He’s constantly shaking. He prescribes her weird medicines that make her sick. It’s the blind leading the blind when it comes to the medical profession in this book.
Then there’s the last man…
I wouldn’t say the end is flawed, and I wouldn’t declare it as problematic, because I don't know if there is such a thing as an objective view of art from a subjective place. But I wasn’t keen on the end. Subjectively, I was disappointed. But she has to come back down to Earth. There are sacrifices.
“Romantic obsession is the same creative energy that we can channel into art. Love is an act of creation, too.”
While trying to sell two more novels after The Princess of 72nd Street, unsuccessfully, Kraf wrote to an editor that she “never particularly liked The Princess of 72nd Street as literature.” She described the book as a “farewell to a part of my life composed of dreams and fantasies.” Can you relate to the renouncing of one’s past work?
Many writers — and not just writers, but songwriters and visual artists — look back at their work and have doubts about it. I think it’s a very natural part of the process, especially if you’re in a different place in your life than you were when you wrote it. Once the work is in the world, it can feel like it has taken on a life of its own. Sometimes I’ll read things that I’ve written and I’m like, “I don’t even know who wrote this.” I have no recollection. I guess it’s just the shedding of selves. Artists are the lucky ones who have a record of the layers of self.
What in the book do you think will be particularly resonant for the 23-year-olds reading it this summer?
Self-awareness, reflecting on one’s own interiority in a public way, seems to be something that women are more able to exercise now. With the internet, we’re always reflecting on our interiority in a public way. The romantic obsession in the book, too, that’s eternal, but the Princess has a freedom to take on many lovers that I think is contemporary. I wouldn't say she's polyamorous, but she’s not monogamous. People are interested in non-monogamy.
People are also interested in portrayals of a bygone New York.
I haven’t lived in New York in ten years. The first time I lived in New York was for a summer in 1998, then I was there from 2003 to 2013. But whenever I’m back, one of the areas that feels a little less Chase Bank-ified are parts of the Upper West Side. I mean, it’s all Chase Bank-ified, but around 110th to 116th, Broadway and Riverside, still feels like it has that resonance. There are still diners!
Is it fair to call The Princess of 72nd Street a “cult classic”?
“Cult classic” is a high compliment. Who needs to appeal to everybody? To have written a cult classic, that’s pretty f*cking cool.
When Elaine Kraf died, in 2013, no major publication—or any minor ones, as far as I can tell—ran an obituary. This is perhaps unsurprising; although she had worked as a painter and as the principal of a special-education school, she was probably most notable as a novelist, and she hadn’t published a book in more than thirty years. The Times had called her first novel "I Am Clarence", an “extraordinary achievement,” but it was long since out of print, as were two books that had followed it. But her fourth and final book "The Princess of 72nd Street" remains in print; it was reissued by the Dalkey Archive Press in 2000, and has enough of a following to make it seem at least slightly strange that an online search for Kraf returns little more than a six-line Wikipedia page, a couple short bios on publisher Web sites, and a handful of listings for the remaining copies of her works.
I first went looking for information about Kraf after asking, on Twitter, for recommendations for a very specific sort of book. I wanted to read formally experimental novels that were written by women in the nineteen-seventies and eighties and that had what I thought of as a certain New York sensibility. I was picturing un-ashed cigarettes on empty stoops, halogen reflections in scummy puddles, hot asphalt under rushing feet. The novelist and critic Lauren Oyler suggested “The Princess of 72nd Street”; it was the only suggestion that fit the bill. When I asked Oyler how she came to know of the book, I got a sense of the novel’s following: she’d heard about it from a critic, Kaitlin Phillips, who was put on to it by the novelist Joshua Cohen. Cohen had heard of Kraf not from a writer but from a performer, the late Joel Gold, who, Cohen explained, “paid his bills as a cameraman and fashion photographer, but dedicated his life to performing, not as a standup so much as an improvising monologist in the Professor Irwin Corey/Lord Buckley tradition.”
“The Princess of 72nd Street” tells the story of Ellen, a bipolar artist who lives in Manhattan and paints “tangerines, brown teapots, rolls and books.” Much of the novel concerns her “radiances,” or manic episodes, when she becomes Esmeralda, who dresses in clothing with “flowers, cascades of color, or abstract designs,” plus medallions: an Egyptian ankh and “crushed metal found in the garbage.” She is proud and mad and charming, a star in the firmament who is often taken for “a hooker, Sabra, American Indian, actress, ballerina, witch, holy saint, mother, girl, mystic, ethereal spirit, bitch, earth goddess.” The Upper West Side that Esmeralda rules is “not a country for Nordic blondes of impeccable taste” but for “film makers who talk film but never make one, some film makers who actually do, residents who do nothing or once did something, actors and actresses waiting on line, overly casual psychologists, and a few self-made mystics”—people who drink and sleep and smoke together in tiny apartments that line “sooty streets with outdoor tables put right down among the garbage bags,” where the sunlight glitters off the grime.
The book is a high and a comedown at once—a paroxysm of sex and booze and, above all, color. It’s that rare thing: a true underappreciated classic. So why did Kraf never publish another book?
Kraf was born in the Bronx, in 1936, to a pair of lifelong New Yorkers, Harry and Lena Kraf, née Rosenfeld. Her father was a member of the New York State Senate from 1956 to 1965, and of the State Assembly from ’67 to ’72. (He got an obituary in the Times.) Elaine was their only daughter. In her early forties, she married a credit-and-collections consultant and poet named Martin Altman, who told me that his ex-wife—they divorced in 2002—had rejected her parents’ hopes that she would settle down with a businessman or a congressman’s son. Instead, she went to art school. Her father, Altman said, “would not attend her art shows or publishing events. He saw no value in art or the life of the mind.” But, he added, Elaine “had a creative force in her that strove to break the bonds that held it back, whether in art, writing, fashion.”
Altman and Kraf adopted a daughter, Milena Kraf Altman, who told me that her mother “reinvented herself every couple of years.” Kraf worked in special-education schools and, in 1986, became a principal at Astoria Blue Feather. Throughout the seventies and eighties, she painted and wrote. Her visual art, like her writing, often had a fragmentary quality. She made mixed-media portraits with “different textures and fabrics,” Milena said. “She would be walking down the streets of New York, and she would see an old drawer, and she would pick it up and be, like, ‘O.K., this is gonna be my canvas.’ ”
Kraf’s novels vary in style but share a handful of themes. She was fascinated, in particular, by those who deviate from social norms (artists, lunatics, circus performers) and by the methods used to keep social norms in place (psychoanalysis, mental institutions, lobotomies). All of the books feature a beautiful, isolated female protagonist of delicate sanity who is surrounded by untrustworthy men. “I Am Clarence,” her début, employs a series of disparate viewpoints to explore the relationship between a mentally ill mother, her suitors, and her disabled son. Like the main character in “The Princess of 72nd Street,” the mother is disintegrating, unable to find respect or love, and perhaps unable to give it, too. Her son, Clarence, is mocked and pitied. She lets a group of doctors experiment with him and possibly give him a lobotomy and, in the end, he is taken away.
Her second novel, “ The House of Madelaine" is altogether stranger: to the extent that it has a plot at all, it is about a woman who shares her first name with the author and is unable to escape the inhabitants of a house which belongs to a friend. Eventually, she is accused of murdering her friend’s husband, and faces an absurd trial; the novel’s most obvious influence is “Alice in Wonderland.” It is profoundly disorienting, like a recurring dream, the details of which keep escaping you. Passages seem to connect before lurching out of reach, as if disappearing, with the book’s characters, down the house’s central hallway, lined with Formica tables.
Kraf’s first two books were published by Doubleday, but, unsurprisingly, after “The House of Madelaine,” she left corporate publishing for independent houses. The Fiction Collective, which was run by a group of experimental writer-editors—including Ronald Sukenick, Jonathan Baumbach, B. H. Friedman, and Peter Spielberg—put out her third book, “Find Him!” Its narrator is an unnamed, childlike woman, who one day awakes dressed as a schoolgirl, unable to eat, speak, or clean herself without aid. Her caregiver is a man named Oliver, who alternately presents as her father, lover, captor, abuser, and teacher. Oliver, we learn, had a wife, Edith, who has vanished; it is strongly suggested that Edith is our narrator before she had a lobotomy. The text weaves together dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, and is broken up by musical notations and drawings. An unsettling meditation on patriarchal violence and the construction of femininity, the novel feels indebted to both Tillie Olsen and Anaïs Nin, two of Kraf’s favorite authors, and deserves to be rediscovered as a significant work of feminist literature.
But, if there is one author who seems to act as a forebear for Kraf, it is Jean Rhys, whose work Kraf considered in an essay that she published in 1985. Rhys’s women, Kraf argues, are essentially a single character, a deteriorating figure who is a “victim of her self-destructive nature and of her dependence, for survival, upon men.” Rhys’s men, Kraf writes, while distinct, are generally loathsome, feckless, and chauvinistic.
It’s Rhys who comes to mind when reading “The Princess of 72nd Street,” with its unspooling account of how it feels to come apart when you were never really whole. At the beginning of the book, Ellen/Esmeralda has at least a degree of control, or if nothing else the illusion of it: she “projects a special dignity” no one would want to “defile or tamper with,” she says. She’s wrong, of course—wrong, Kraf seems to suggest, because she is a woman, wrong because that means that somebody, somewhere, will always want to defile or tamper with her dignity. When Ellen enters a radiance, the prose becomes frenetic, whirligig; we do not merely observe Esmeralda but race alongside her, across a Manhattan filled with jazz clubs and street performers and bright yellow sunlight. After this centrifugal rush, the return to earth, during her depressive periods, is wrenching. By the end, we have seen her exploited and abused, and the ache and tear of the novel comes in our recognizing that this has happened before she does. Although the book is wryly funny—“Anyone who wears a brassiere on West 72nd Street is suspect,” Esmeralda says, in one of many memorable declarations—it is also devastating.
In order to interest New Directions in publishing “The Princess of 72nd Street,” Kraf sent “letter after letter” to New Directions, Altman told me—“sort of quirky letters,” he added. They worked. In the first few years after the book was released, she wrote two more novels, with the working titles “Joachim and the Angels” and “The Final Delusions of Cinderella Korn,” and she hoped that New Directions would publish them, too. She told Peter Glassgold, an editor there, in a letter, that she had “forced out” the first of these books “during a difficult period.” The publishing house passed on that one, and also on “Cinderella Korn,” though Altman recalls that New Directions asked Kraf to rewrite it “at least twice, which she tried to do.” He got the impression from Kraf that the publisher “wanted something more like ‘The Princess of 72nd Street.’ ” Milena remembers her mother being relatively sanguine about her rejections. “She understood, I guess, the reasoning why,” Milena said. “And she just kept at it. She had a bunch of novels that she would try to get out there, but no one was picking them up.”
In another letter to Glassgold, Kraf wrote that she “never particularly liked ‘The Princess of 72nd Street’ as literature. In that,” she went on, “I guess our tastes are very different.” She was in her mid-forties, and had recently had a miscarriage and an accompanying intestinal virus; she was still recuperating. She described “The Princess of 72nd Street” as a “farewell to a part of my life composed of dreams and fantasies,” adding, “I was young for a long long time and now I am not young any longer.” She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which gave her a year to work on “Cinderella Korn.” She later said that the book came from “the good, creative part” of her.
Milena said that her mother, near the end of her life, was working on a play about a woman who has, perhaps, seen her younger self in Central Park. She was “very determined to finish it,” Milena said. But, in 2011, Kraf was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She died two years later. Kraf’s unfinished manuscripts, alongside starts and scraps of unrealized novels, sit in a storage space in Manhattan, which is “filled with so much of her artwork and her writings,” Milena told me. She has not yet been able to properly go through it all. ♦
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