The letters of Hart Crane, 1916-1932

These letters trace the arc of one of American poetry's most turbulent geniuses. Hart Crane wrote with the same ferocity he brought to his revolutionary verse, and this correspondence maps his impossible ambition: to forge an American epic that could hold the continent's violence, beauty, and reinvention in a single voice. The letters begin in 1916, when the young poet was just finding his radical style, and end in 1932, two years before his death by suicide at thirty-two. Here is the man behind The Bridge, rendered in his own raw, frequently desperate, often hilarious correspondence. We see his arguments with mentors, his entanglement with friends and lovers, his desperate requests for money, his elation over a finished stanza, and his unraveling. This is the closest thing to an autobiography Crane left us: a self-portrait drawn in ink across the most productive and painful years of a life that burned too briefly.