Bodenheim, Maxwell

▪ American poet

original name  Maxwell Bodenheimer  

born May 26, 1893, Hermanville, Miss., U.S.

died Feb. 6, 1954, New York, N.Y.

      poet who contributed to the development of the Modernist movement in American poetry but is best remembered for his long career as a personality in literary bohemia.

      Largely self-educated, Bodenheim appeared in Chicago around 1913, during the period of the Chicago Renaissance. He wrote plays with Ben Hecht (Hecht, Ben) and helped him edit the short-lived Chicago Literary Times (1923–24). Later they fell out, conducting a much-publicized feud and featuring each other as characters in their novels: Bodenheim appears as a character in Hecht's Count Bruga (1926), and Hecht appears in Bodenheim's Ninth Avenue (1926).

      Bodenheim's poems were first published in Poetry magazine in 1914, and his first collection was Minna and Myself (1918). Several other volumes of poetry followed, his Selected Poems, 1914–44 appearing in 1946. He employed many of the striking visual techniques of the Imagists.

      Bodenheim settled in New York's Greenwich Village in the latter part of the 1920s. Novels as well as poems appeared regularly during that decade and the next, but increasing dissipation curtailed his output after World War II. He had been reduced to peddling his poems in bars when he and his third wife were murdered in their lodgings by a former mental patient. Ben Hecht helped with the funeral expenses and portrayed Bodenheim with affection in his play Winkelberg (1958). Bodenheim's unfinished autobiography, My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, appeared in 1954, shortly after his death. Among the better of his largely forgotten novels are Blackguard (1923), Crazy Man (1924), Georgie May (1928), Sixty Seconds (1929), and Naked on Roller Skates (1931).

Additional Reading

Jack B. Moore, Maxwell Bodenheim (1970).

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