Early Life
Born in Washington, D. C., on November 4, 1904, Mooney was the son of Ione Lee Gaut Mooney (died 1955), an important figure in the Daughters of the American Revolution, and James Mooney, an ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on American Indian lore such as the Ghost Dance.
Mooney, armed with a natural gift for astute observation and expository writing, set forth on a life of adventure in 1923 or 1924 by boarding a freighter bound for Salonika and Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire had recently collapsed and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was emerging as the leader of the secular Republic of Turkey. Returning to the United States, Mooney considered school at Catholic University before seeking his fortune in New York City where he wrote advertising copy for a travel agency. In 1927 he lived briefly in Paris; he also sojourned, within this period abroad, in a community in Brittany.
Attractive, fun-loving and personally engaging, Mooney, though aloof by nature and often temperamental, made friends easily; these included, besides the artists Leslie Powell and Don Forbes, writer and raconteur Eugene MacCown (who, besides a famous portrait of shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, painted a portrait of Paul), and possibly writer René Crevel. Like his father an ardent Irish patriot, he sought out writer James Joyce and others of the expatriate Irish community living in Paris. Returning to New York, he published in 1927 Seven Poems, verses which, according to his biographer Gerry Max, "speak of adventure, unrequited love, triumphant love, carnal love, death and burial."
Read more about this topic: Paul Mooney (writer)
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