Crosby, Harry

▪ American poet and publisher

byname of  Henry Grew Crosby  

born June 4, 1898, Boston, Mass., U.S.

died Dec. 10, 1929, New York, N.Y.

      American poet who, as an expatriate in Paris in the 1920s, established the Black Sun Press.

      Crosby was known for his bizarre behaviour. After barely escaping death in World War I, he became morbid and rebellious. His courtship of a married woman shocked society; rejecting conventional mores, Crosby settled in Paris in the early 1920s and soon joined the circle of literary expatriates.

      In 1927 he and his wife, Caresse Crosby, née Jacob (1892–1970), began to publish their own poetry under the imprint Editions Narcisse, later the Black Sun Press. The following year they started printing books by other writers, such as Archibald MacLeish, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, for which the press is best remembered.

      In his poetry—which has little artistic merit— Crosby unconsciously traced literary tradition from 19th-century Romanticism, in Sonnets for Caresse (1925), to automatic writing, in Sleeping Together (1929), descriptions of his dreams. His work includes poetry that shows his obsessive sun worship, such as Chariot of the Sun (1928); his diaries, Shadows of the Sun (1928–30); and contributions to the avant-garde magazine transition. Crosby took his own life in 1929.

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