The son of Charles Denby, Junior. and Martha Dalzell Orr, Edwin was born in Tientsin, China, where Charles had been appointed as chief foreign advisor to Yuan Shi Kai a year earlier. Denby spent his childhood first in Shanghai, China, then in Vienna, Austria, where his father served as consul general from 1909 to 1915, before coming to the United States in 1916.
He was educated at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. And attended Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but failed to graduate. He also attended classes at the University of Vienna, before obtaining a diploma in gymnastics (with specialty in modern dance) at the Hellerau-Laxenburg school in Vienna in 1928.
Edwin"s grandfather, Charles Harvey Denby, who had served as the United States Ambassador to China for an unprecedented 13 years, died when Edwin was age one. He performed for several years, notably with the Darmstadt State Theater and celebrated triumphs alongside Claire Eckstein, a German ballerina and choreographer. Looking for someone to take his passport photo, he encountered photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt in Switzerland in 1934, and the two remained inseparable for the rest of Denby"s life.
The following year, they returned to New York City, New York, and rented a loft for eighteen dollars a month in a five-story walk-up building on West 21st Street in Chelsea.
Works In 1948, he was awarded a ship grant in poetry and dance criticism. On July 12, 1983, at the summer house he maintained with Burckhardt in Searsmont Maine, he committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
He had been ill and increasingly concerned about the loss of his mental powers. Denby was inducted into the National Museum of Dance"s Mr.
& Mistress Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 2002.
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