Hart Crane: A Life

A gifted writer with a weakness for alcohol, a demanding mother and an untimely death by suicide, American lyric poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) might easily be mistaken for Ernest Hemingway, who was born the same day a few hundred miles away. Crane's tragedies and creative struggles, like Hemingway's, make for compelling biographical fodder. In Hart Crane: A Life, Clive Fisher (Noel Coward), a very close reader, explicates attentively, and his meticulous detective work also sheds light on Crane's forays into the gay underworld and the tense family dynamics that dominated much of his life. The book is less successful at sustaining a historical and intellectual trajectory, and, like his subject, Fisher likes to indulge in the occasional ecstatic ramble. But on the whole, Crane devotees will find much to savor in this useful addition to the literary history of a much documented era.