Harry Crosby

Harry Crosby (June 4, 1898 – December 10, 1929) was an American poet and publisher associated with the Lost Generation in American literature. Born Henry Sturgis Crosby in Boston’s Back Bay, he came from one of New England’s richest banking families, with ancestry tied to the Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Morgans, and Grews. His parents later changed his middle name to Grew. He was the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, wife of financier J. P. Morgan, Jr., and heir to part of a large family fortune.

Crosby grew up in a world of Boston privilege, summer houses, private schools, and family expectations. He attended Noble and Greenough School and then St. Mark’s, graduating in 1917. His mother, religious and affectionate, loved nature and helped found the Garden Club of America; she also gave him a love of poetry. His father was a banker with Ivy League and Boston society ties. Even as a child, Crosby showed a taste for mischief, once tossing water bombs from upper floors onto unsuspecting guests.

At nineteen, Crosby volunteered as an ambulance driver in France during World War I and later served in the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps. Near Verdun, he carried wounded soldiers from the front lines for three days without relief. On November 22, 1917, an artillery shell struck close to his ambulance, destroying the vehicle. Crosby escaped injury, but his close friend Way “Spud” Spaulding was badly wounded. Crosby later said that night changed him from a boy to a man, and from then on he never feared death.

His letters home from France changed as the war went on. Early on, he believed God had “ordained the war” to cleanse the world, but he later wrote of the horror of trench warfare and the dead and dying men he transported. In August 1918, his section evacuated more than 2,000 wounded near Orme while under heavy German bombardment and was cited for bravery. In 1919, Crosby became one of the youngest Americans awarded the Croix de guerre. He returned to Boston a decorated veteran, but not one willing to live the expected life of a privileged Bostonian.

In 1920, Crosby met and married Caresse Crosby. Their affair caused scandal and gossip in blue-blood Boston, and the couple left for Europe, where they gave themselves to art and poetry. They lived extravagantly, drank, smoked opium regularly, traveled often, and kept an open marriage. In the late 1920s, Crosby wrote and published poetry marked by solar symbolism and mysticism, with themes of sexual intercourse, pagan worship, sacrifice, death, and suicide. He and Caresse also founded the Black Sun Press, which first published work by writers including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, James Joyce, René Crevel, and Kay Boyle.

Crosby moved among some of the best-known creative figures of the early twentieth century, including Salvador Dalí, Hemingway, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. His life ended in 1929, when he died alongside his new partner, Josephine Noyes Rotch, in a murder-suicide that was speculated to have been a suicide pact. His writing remains striking because it came from the collision of wealth, war, revolt, desire, and a steady nearness to death. On a quotes website, his words belong to the fevered edge of the Lost Generation, where beauty and danger were rarely kept apart.