Nightwood tells the stories of the love-lives of a group of Americans and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s - an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. One of the earliest novels to explicitly portray homosexuality, the influence of Djuna Barnes' novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional. Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.