About Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby, born June 4, 1898 in Boston - died December 10, 1929 in New York, was an American poet and publisher. Harry Crosby married in 1922 Mary Phelps Jacob known as Polly (1892-1970), inventor of the bra, divorced from Dick Peabody, and who was nicknamed by him Caresse. Together, they created the Black Sun Press editions in Paris in 1927 which will publish the main Anglo-Saxon writers of the time. Themselves will write a number of collections of poems and will leave memoirs and diaries. They will lead a restless and very free life in the Paris of the 1920s in the company of the Franco-American bohemians of the time.Harry Crosby committed suicide with his mistress Josephine Bigelow in December 1929 at the Hotel des Artistes in New York, for no apparent reason. Crosby as a poet was never more than a minor literary figure while he lived, and was remembered more for his scandalous suicide over his creative efforts. She also established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, that published paperback books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Dorothy Parker, among others.
Crosby's friend Crane committed suicide less than two years later. Malcolm Cowley, whom Crosby had published, wrote in his 1934 book Exile's Return, that the death of Harry Crosby becomes a symbol of the rise and fall of the Jazz Age. He recited the excesses typified by Crosby's extravagant lifestyle as evidence of the shallowness of society during that era.
In 1931, Caresse also published Torchbearer, a collection of his poetry with an afterword by Ezra Pound, and Aphrodite in Flight, a 75-paragraph-long prose-poem and how-to manual for lovers that compared making love to a woman to flying planes. Caresse published a boxed set of Crosby's work titled Collected poems of Harry Crosby containing Chariot of the Sun with D. H. Lawrence's introduction, Transit of Venus with T. S. Eliot's introduction, Sleeping Together with Stuart Gilbert's introduction, and Torchbearer in 1931.
A new collection of Harry Crosby's poetry, Ladders to the Sun: Poems by Harry Crosby was published by Soul Bay Press in April 2010.
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