"In the 1920's, some people, especially his wife Caresse, thought Harry Crosby a poet, but now 'The Oxford Companion to American Literature' knows as little of him as 'A Literary History of the ‘United. States.' What fame he has achieved he earned largely through his final act. Keats once said that he was half in love with easeful death. Harry Crosby was wholly in love with it and he consummated his affair with it in 1929 when at the age of 31 he calmly Shot his married girlfriend and then himself in a ninth‐floor apartment of the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street in New York. For once the tabloid headlines got it right: 'Tragedy and Disgrace.' What brought this rich, brave, drunken, self‐centered neurotic to this pass and what it all as to do with literature is the burden of Geoffrey Wolff's fascinating biography. ..."
NY Times: Black Sun (Aug. 22, 1976)
Studs Terkel (Audio)
amazon
2009 January: Harry Crosby, 2012 June: Transit of Venus
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