Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby

by Geoffrey Wolff

Includes an afterword by the author

Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby's pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself.

Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, True Crime, American, France, Classics

367 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1976

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harry Crosby is one of those characters who exist primarily in the footnotes and margins of other people's lives. A publisher and wannabe poet in 1920s Paris, he saw the running of the bulls with Hemingway, went drinking with Hart Crane and Kay Boyle, and published Joyce, Proust and DH Lawrence. But his claim to fame rests – uneasily for this biographer – on the fact that at the age of 31 he shot himself and a girlfriend dead in a New York hotel as part of a quasi-mystical joint suicide.

It's an uneasy fact because that was, in all probability, precisely Crosby's intention: to make his life meaningful by dramatically ending it. Killing himself was ‘his best poem’, as John Wheelwright commented. For years, Crosby had been obsessed by suicide – had been writing about it, had been talking about it to those around him – and in the end, in Geoffrey Wolff's rather harsh summary,

he could only redeem from clownish bewilderment such poems as he had chosen to write by an enactment of their convictions.

Although Crosby is a mainstay of accounts of '20s Paris, he was actually fairly atypical. He found Montparnasse seedy, and avoided the café culture so beloved of most of the American literary expats; unlike them, he could afford to, being from an upper-class family of Boston Brahmins, and fabulously wealthy. When he got married, he sent his father the excellent telegram:

PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE

And they certainly did. Harry and his American wife ‘Caresse’ (a name they came up with) lived in a whirl of drinking, socialising and partner-swapping whose intensity was only matched by a corresponding intensity for art and literature. At one do, they served ‘a champagne punch made from forty bottles of brut, and five each of whiskey, cointreau and gin’; Harry had on some elaborate outfit that involved stringing dead pigeons around his neck, while Caresse ‘wore bare breasts and a turquoise wig’. Now this is a party.

For Harry, it was less about hedonism than about enacting the aesthetics of the Decadent literature he revered: Baudelaire, Verlaine, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Huysmans. For him, there was nothing metaphorical or rhetorical about their ideas: ‘What Huysmans imagined, Harry performed’.

This set him apart from the (less literal-minded) writers around him. Joyce and DH Lawrence, whose work Crosby adored, were shocked by him in person, and he in turn found them strangely prudish compared to the possibilities that seemed to be offered by their writing.

But there was always something pathological about Crosby's commitment to his ideals. His desire to shock his Boston family led to him to overshare with his mother (who hung on his weekly letters), mixing demands for money with intricate details of his drunkenness, affairs, and sexual fantasies (‘I should like to have a harem, no girl to be over fifteen except Caresse’).

Possibly a lot of it – as for many of that generation – went back to his experience of the war. Crosby had served at Verdun in the ambulance corps, and at one point miraculously survived an explosion that literally vaporised the vehicle he'd been sitting in. After that, perhaps it's no surprise that he resolved to have ‘neither the time nor the manner of his death chosen for him; he would die when he was ready, when he wished to die’.

Certainly by the time he was at Harvard, he was already waving gigantic red flags at Caresse, writing things like, ‘I promise you never to kill myself unless you die or unless I kill us both together,’ which would make most people run a mile. As Wolff points out, if he had gone into stocks and shares like his father wanted, the state would have intervened when he started ranting about suicide; as an eccentric poet, such talk was tolerated when not actively encouraged.

The poet, of course, pays a price for the indulgence of society, for by permitting him his free play of ideas, society treats his ideas as mere play. He doesn't mean it, society says; he's just being literary. Harry meant it.

Wolff's analysis of such states of mind is incisive and compelling, and he writes very well. At times I did wonder if he was painting Crosby in an excessively negative light – his behaviour was often terrible, but you do expect a little more sympathy from a biographer, at least to help you understand him. Wolff is particularly harsh on his subject's literary efforts. Crosby's poem ‘The Golden Gourd’ isn't very good, but is it really fair to claim that it qualifies ‘for consideration among the most comical ineptitudes in the language’?

I wanted to know a lot more about Caresse. She emerges as one of the most fascinating characters in here, waltzing around Paris in a golden tuxedo with a whippet bitch called Clytoris (one wonders how easily Harry could find it..). Wolff treats her with sensitivity, but a more recent biographer would, I think, be compelled to push her to the very front of this story: how much was she just going along with Harry's lifestyle, and how much was she an equal participant? She lived for decades after Harry's suicide, remarried, divorced, became friends with Ginsberg, Dalí and Anaïs Nin, founded a global citizenship organisation, and finally died in 1970 in her castle in Rome. That is a life worth more investigation.

Not that Harry's isn't. He is also fascinating, as are so many of the stories of that time and place, when Europe was recovering from a cataclysm and art seemed to some to be a matter of life and death. From that perspective, Crosby – ‘a poet of final stanzas’ – is instructive and rather sobering. His short life, Wolff suggests, can be seen as ‘an entire laboratory wherein may be studied the terminal consequences of the religion of art’.

[Springs Toledo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geoffrey Wolff is a very capable writer. I'd never read him until my fascination with the 1920s compelled me to pick up this book at Isaiah Thomas, a sprawling bookstore in Mashpee, MA. Wolff is eloquent, diligent, and insightful; I'd even say great. What baffled me was why he would direct his attention to an unconscionable cad and degenerate like Harry Crosby. Crosby was not merely a hedonist relentlessly pursuing the next high, he was a child molester and a murderer who was indulged throughout his worthless life when he should have been slapped around. I'd recast the subtitle just so: "A disturbing exploration of what can happen when old money meets bad parenting." This book nearly ruined my Christmas, but I can't bring myself to give a great writer like Geoffrey Wolff anything less than 5 stars. On to Somerset Maugham's "Christmas Holiday," a salve.

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've owned this book for many years because how could one not see this book and immediately buy it with intent to read? It is about a small-time publisher, poet, and mystic who leads a violent crazy life that culminates in murder-suicide on the cusp of the Great Depression!!! Hart Crane and Kay Boyle are in it and James Joyce makes a cameo even!!!!

The problem is that Harry Crosby is actually not that interesting. The story is riven with a single deus ex machina--the inexhaustible fortune of Harry's family, which continually steps in to help Harry and Caresse buy race horses or go on flying lessons or spend weeks masturbating to the sunrise while devising sick acrostics for his name. It's interesting that the story makes no bones about the fact that Harry is kind of bad as both a poet and a publisher, and illustrating the ways in which one gets along in the world as a kind of bad poet and publisher who is nevertheless very wealthy and free with money--the extravagant sex & mysticism wastes that Crosby gets up to, crossed with weird efforts at reform and business success. It's the story of someone who wants passionately to be an Oddball Genius but who is not that smart or talented, and it's kind of rare to see that rendered so well, but, um, it is not that satisfying a story, I guess? RICH KID SQUANDERS FORTUNE ON PRETENTIOUS WASTES OF TIME. DOG BITES MAN. Except . . . in Paris! In the Twenties!

The trouble is that this is a biography written from a basic place of condescension rather than awe maybe. Both elements are there, but the former is firmly in control, and that gets in the way of what's wonderful about this book.

Also there is not nearly enough about Caresse Crosby? Would love to know if anyone has good book recommendations about her, because she seems generally like the better Crosby. I mean she hung out with Anais Nin and tried to start a world peace center at Delphi and ran an art colony in a Roman castle and also she invented the bra and possibly the paperback.

I think my main beef with this book is its structure. A story that's fundamentally about a kind of perpetual antithesis--man rejects Boston in favor of worshiping the Sun as a death god--should really follow a slightly more chronological pattern than this does, with Crosby's exploits grouped mostly by thematic association. I really wanted more of a sense of how this life was actually dissolving in the act of its flowering, and jumping back and forth throughout the Twenties to trace various affairs didn't do it for me totally?

The parts about how small press publishing worked in Lost Generation-era Paris are awesome. Basically if you were rich and had access to paper stocks you could make cool zines with your friends! This is also an element I enjoyed in the Diary of Anais Nin, Volume II (clean version.)

[Sketchbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

WW1 left Harry brutally shell-shocked. He was rich, handsome, charming and supported the arts while taking drugs and experimenting sexually. This bio, packed w trivia, has a Puritan-American tone, but who can't be wild about Harry?

Biographer Wolff offers exact reflections on the French, as Harry lived in Paris throughout the 20s : "The French have elevated toleration of eccentricity to the estate of a creed," he notes, while being basically conventional seekers of form and balance. The French are so damn sure of their own manners that they don't care what their guests are up to. Foreigners always come and go; they're neither threats nor inspirations. He concludes: Foreigners are invisible creatures.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crosby sounds like a frantic bore and his poetry is a joke, but his milieux - old school Boston society, the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, Paris in the 1920s - are fascinating. By the way, someone should do a full biography, or at least publish the correspondence, of Walter Van Rensselaer Berry, Crosby’s uncle and mentor, Edith Wharton’s first reader and idol, and a close friend of both James and Proust. Francophile, bibliophile, tennis champion. And a well-connected diplomatic operator. I’m always greedy for descriptions of him in memoirs by or biographies of his better-known friends, relatives and contemporaries. Whenever they talk about his library I just sigh.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stellar writing on Wolff's part, though you have to tolerate the subject because he's a bit of an ass. It's the old separating art from artist thing, only in this case, separating biography from subject. Enjoyed best the setting (20s Paris, for the most part) and the cast of characters (lots of Lost Generation folk, to whom I feel an affinity of sorts).

[Rjyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, Mr. Wolff sure brings Harry Crosby to life! A little ways in I was starting to get real annoyed at the condescension the author kept leveling at his subject. A little ways further, I was amused at how the author had, in this, assumed the role of The Sun-- the object of Harry's worship and obsession-- in bringing its subject to life but also pitilessly withering him with that same light. By the end, it was clear that Wolff's often-harsh judgements of Crosby are a product of his incredible affection for him, and very likely part of Wolff's own personal issues with hero-worship, one of Crosby's qualities that seems to unnerve Wolff the most.

At times the chronology is unclear, as Wolff doesn't move in a linear path through Crosby's life. He starts with childhood, but once Crosby is out of the war and living in Europe, Wolff traces and retraces the years, focusing on different relationships and interests. Dude died at 31, though, and Wolff is aiming for as comprehensive portrait as possible, so this makes sense, although I feel as if he could've helped us out a little bit more keep straight what was happening when in relation to the other whats. But all in all, this is a very engrossing and exciting telling of Crosby's story.

[Sarah Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LEAD A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE" (4).

Born in 1898 to a wealthy and prominent Boston family, Harry Crosby did indeed live a mad and extravagant life. He hated conventions, was famously generous, and never imperious. He hated holidays because "they were arbitrary periods of freedom which were given rather than taken, and because they were occasions for artificial merriment" (104). He always dressed in black and was repelled by the touch of strangers, although he had numerous lovers and sincerely claimed to love both his wife and several other women at the same time. Harry considered himself a sun worshipper, intrinsically linked love and death, and despite his seemingly fickle devotion was found charming to his many lovers and to anyone upon whom he cast his attentions. He introduced Hemingway to "lion tamers and clowns at a Spanish circus temporarily in Paris" (182) and got drunk with William Carlos Williams and then with E.E. Cummings, "whom he met in a hotel lobby" (268). Causing a great scandal and his family's anger, he finally convincing his great love Polly to divorce her first husband and marry him, then recreated her with the new name Caresse. Harry was a prolific poet, but by all accounts not a very good one. He is best known for his socially shocking death and for establishing the Black Sun Press that published books by Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Crane, Pound, Proust, MacLeish, and Kay Boyle throughout the Twenties.

At the age of 31, Harry scandalously killed his lover Josephine (another man's wife) and then himself in an apparent joint suicide, although no note was left behind. Yet Harry, through his writings and conversations, had many times declared his intent to die young and by his own hand; "he never let up with his talk of death and love, the two always mixed in his imagination, with mutual suicide apprehended as the most sublime of couplings" (83). Harry and Josephine both made their intentions clear over and over. The night before their death, Josephine brought Harry a letter. The last line read "Death is our marriage" (285). Harry finally found a woman willing to do what Caresse would not - immortalize their love through mutual suicide.

In many ways, Harry achieved what he intended through his death - he immortalized his life and his writing. Indeed, the author admits that his interest in writing this very biography was largely spurred by the way that Harry died. Yet Harry's story feels very unfinished, if for no other reason than the almost endless list of literary ambitions Harry left incomplete: "He had plans for a novel, with dialogue 'crisp and epigrammatic,' whose heroine's life was to be 'built upon the fact that once upon a time she had sold a bouquet of roses to the Queen of Roumania.' [...] He fiddled with his diary, intending to translate it into a cohesive autobiography, and perhaps to embellish it with fantasy. He planned to write a biography of Rimbaud. He considered a play based on Walter Berry's life. He wanted do write an essay about Polia Chentoff and her work, and to extend into a book-length monograph the essay on sun dials he had written for his mother..." (277).

It's hard to summarize Harry's life, because while very short, it was filled with frantic activity, great exploration, and numerous well known individuals. I truly enjoyed reading about his nearly unbelievable life story, although I enjoyed the chapters covering his writing and providing in-depth analysis of his poems and writing ability far less intriguing.

[tortoise dreams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Portrait of the struggling, Lost Generation poet as a young millionaire in Paris. With a staff of servants and a stable of both racehorses and mistresses, Harry Crosby was the nephew of J.P. Morgan (the Warren Buffett of his day) and served bravely in the ambulance corps during the First World War, nearly dying. Rebelling against his Boston Brahmin lineage he wanted to be Rimbaud, presenting his obsession with death, sex, and sun worship. He was a mediocre poet (at best), but a valuable publisher, founding Black Sun Press with his wife Caresse, which printed off-beat, luxe editions by well known writers including D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hemingway, Hart Crane, among others. He also supported the important literary magazine transition. and was generous with other writers and artists. Black Sun is especially engaging for its view of Paris between the wars: Edith Wharton, Dali, Pickford and Fairbanks, the authors listed above, and more make appearances. Well researched and thorough, the only question is "why?" Other than his young death, the sterile decadence, and endless excess, there isn't much here here. Irresistible for those who like that sort of thing, for many readers Black Sun will be underwhelming. Much of the impact and enjoyment depends on Wolfe's skillful writing, which can tend toward the florid, and he is more opinionated than neutral as a biographer. An excellent biography about a footnote in literary history. [3½★]

[Nick Guzan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and incredibly well-researched account of Harry Crosby - and, to an extent, his ebullient and far shrewder wife Caresse.

I wasn't a big fan of the non-linear layout; once Harry had left his job at the bank, each chapter takes a sprawling approach at covering one certain aspect of his life for his few remaining years. Despite this, I learned much more about the fascinating yet "minor" place that Harry and Caresse Crosby occupied among the true artists of the 1920s Lost Generation.

I appreciated that Wolff's interest seems to have mirrored mine; neither of us are particularly big fans of Crosby's poetic attempts but just rather the interesting life that he had built for himself - and then so promptly ended with Josephine - all in the name of what he believed to be literature.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 for life interestingness, 3 for book interestingness.

I haven't even attended one interesting orgy or done any of the more interesting drugs or written any interesting terrible poetry -- boy, this guy sure was interestinger than me.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Crosby's life was a religious manifestation. His death was a comprehensible emotional act... A death of excess."
For what reason would I be enamored with a biography about a spoiled boy with a seemingly endless fortune? About shell-shock and Harvard clubs? But I was enamored.
Harry Crosby was a thrilling study of Decadence and Aesthetics in a world he didn't belong to.
Geoffrey Wolff is an excellent biographer whose writing was essential to the effectiveness of Harry's philosophies and artistic theories. Dangerous in the way it made me want to live such an insatiable but intentional existence.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a number of years ago and came back to it recently. No real reason why except that I was in the mood for some wacky, over the top biography. Found it here. Oh to be a fly on the wall with the Crosby family. A page turning book that reads like a novel. Absolutely worth revisiting. Loved.

4.5 ⭐️

[Alex Hanover · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating read, but an unbearable man. The eccentricity is at first funny, but quickly becomes alarming and ultimately tragic. Beneath the Parisian artistic scene and the Lost Generation’s excesses, the irreversible traumas of WWI fester.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Francine Kopun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harry Crosby was not worthy of this long and detailed biography. He was a rich but minor figure in the literary expat community in France in the 1920s. A friend of great writers, but not a great writer. A murderer, which is barely dealt with, as if the woman he killed was a footnote and it’s enough to say that she was part of a suicide pact, when in fact, she was a misguided young woman out of her depth with the older, experienced, and manipulative Crosby. He lived every day to it’s fullest, well, bravo, but there are people who do that without ruining the lives of the people who love them. Harry Crosby mattered little in his time; he matters not at all now.

[Adam S. Rust · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really skillfully rendered portrait about a deeply repellant human. Can't really recommend it, but the craft of the writer is excellent.

[ET · Rating 2 out of 5]

"He who loves should always feel a lack and should always keep his wounds open"
-Novalis

"Whether in the sphere of art and legend or in real life, a dramatic and tragic end for lovers seems inevitable. Even when the causes of such a tragedy seem external and extrinsic to the conscious will and human desire of the lovers and appear due to an unlucky destiny, it is the inner, transcendental logic of the situation that demands a tragic outcome. For as a poet once Said: "But a thin veil divides love from death"
- Evola

Harry Crosby had a seemingly irresistible pull towards love of all kinds, but much stronger was his ellipse to death. The author reserved a solely profane and material view of Harrys life, only briefly touching upon (in one chapter (perhaps 12(did the author choose that number by chance?))) the origins of Harrys mystic foundation which he had received individually by ways of ancient myths from around the world.

The book has much useless information crowded around a fascinating character. The book shines only in its objective and extensive analysis combined with all the decadent parties and Jubilee's. It was very interesting to read of Harrys connections with dh Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Archibald, and even Salvador Dali. Sadly Harry was brought downward by his gravitation towards the primitive worship of Dh Lawrence(plumed Serpent) types and decadent Baudelaire types.

The mystic aura of Harrys internal Eros could have sprouted into a full blown awakening if were not for the decadent mania that influenced him. The perfect example is seen within the Jacqueline deity that Harry worshipped ( Dantes Beatrice?). Jacqueline was the imagined woman that captured the unatainable perfection that Harry could never and would never find(naturally). The fact that he had this personal deity shows that Harry was well on his way towards finding the arrow of his target, but rather he sunk into a decadent lust with a Haram of women.

Overall the events are interesting within his life, but Geoffrey Wolff barely understood the esoteric origin of his love and deathly despair, those continual extremes which are closer then first appears. If you do understand the romantic and metaphysical origin of his love then this book is wholly worth it for an example of how this love (when made profane and lustful as a beast) can turn on the user and use him as a fool. Personally I believe Harrys influence of the Rimbaudian "madness" destroyed Harrys internal revolving Sun and fragmented Harry into many pieces. This Ultimately culminated in his early demise by his own fractured soul deceived by ideas of mystic madness. Though I always have respect for a suicide of his grandeur, for it's not as easy an act as it seems.

PS. I would recommend a reading of Julius Evolas "Eros and the mysteries of love" before reading this so you can truly understand Harrys "violent eclipse".

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wolff's memoir of his con man father, The Duke of Deception, is one of my 10 favorite books, so I will read anything else by him. This book's well written, but I don't think Crosby, notorious for his death in an apparent suicide pact, was worth Wolff's efforts. W. sees C. as fundamentally different from other suicides: not depressed or "of unsound mind." Rather, he had always said he would kill himself, & not alone, and that's what he did. Crosby: "Death: the hand that opens the door to our cage, the home we instinctively fly to." Wolff: "He seized for himself a great adventure, created for himself a cosmos, and abandoned it in his own good time."
my favorite passages from the book:
Re c's use of opium: "...to abuse it was to experience each time a miniature death, a liberation from need. It was to kill himself and survive his suicide."
Best of all is Wolff's mini-essay about the diff between writing in French and English: "Language, or more properly, grammar, is the obstacle that blocks the path of anyone ambitious to fit within the skin of a cultivated Frenchman. English is a language in which literacy is achieved by the expression of a huge vocabulary, through the interstices of a loose and easy syntax. It is a language that prizes evolution and surprise, one that requires curiosity and diligence rather than the kind of compulsive analysis and repetition by rote that French children--to their later, greater glory--are obliged to suffer. In all languages, the illiterate may be recognized by their ignorance of approved syntactical arrangements, but in English, once grammar has been absorbed, only vocabulary and perhaps accent distinguishes one speaker from his "inferior." But in French, grammar is a tyrant. It is monstrously difficult, & within its labyrinths are hidden all delicacy and sense, all meaning, all purpose, everything we think of as literature. The grammar of literary French is not available for appropriation by an adult. It is the reward for a childhood nightmare in which the simple thread must first be unraveled from a tangle, and then again and again. French writers come from the unassailable elite whose mark of class is its linguistic style."

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes biographers talk about falling in love with their subjects, noting that it's hard to spend all that time with someone, researching and writing, whom they don't like. I don't know if Wolff fell in love with Crosby in any sense, but he sure finds him interesting. As do I, although I think I find Crosby rather more annoying and silly than Wolff did (although he admits to those qualities, too). He certainly doesn't claim major importance for Crosby, who was, at best, a minor writer. Wolff also insists that he doesn't see Crosby as any sort of exemplar or representative of his time or place. I'm not so sure about that. To me, Crosby's chief interest is as a figure only really possible in that time and place (Lost Generation, Paris in the '20s among the extravagant expats). It's hard to imagine him flourishing or being taken at all seriously in any other time or place or set of circumstances; if he hadn't killed himself at the end of 1929, he'd have found himself a man seriously out of place in the world. He could never have been content back in Boston or even in New York, and how on earth would he have coped with Depression, Fascism, and WWII? He couldn't have coped if his investment income had been seriously affected, as it certainly would have been before long (both because of the stock market crash and because he recklessly drained his capital, much to his father's dismay), as his life was only possible lived on an enormous soft cushion of money (and he showed the patrician disdain for money and business and such sordid, vulgar concerns only possible for someone raised in an atmosphere of unassailable wealth and privilege). He seems to me a figure somewhat comparable to Neal Cassady, the muse of the Beats, who accomplished little and was not at all important in and of himself but was terribly important both for whom he was connected to and for embodying a kind of spirit of the age. And he sure was handsome.

As a side note, I have to say how much I love the NYRB Classics imprint.

[Angelo D Vita · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best biography I’ve ever read.

The story of Black Sun revolves around Harry Crosby, a doomed poet and privileged heir (nephew of J.P. Morgan) who tries—and succeeds—in turning his life into a spectacle of excess. The narrative follows his erratic trajectory—from World War I to the hedonism of 1920s Paris—as he surrenders to a destructive cycle of sex, drugs, and chaos. From the very start, we know his fate: a suicide pact with his lover. But Wolff, with remarkable skill, doesn’t treat death as an endpoint; instead, he places it at the center of Harry’s orbit, a black hole that pulls in his entire existence.

The chaos consuming Harry isn’t limited to his vices—it seeps into his writing, his relationships, and, above all, his obsession with the Sun. He sees it as a personal god, a symbol of transcendence, but this fixation also reveals his attraction to darkness. The star’s incandescence doesn’t dispel the shadow; instead, it sharpens its edges, making the abyss even more visible.

Yes, his life was a whirlwind of excess, but it was also a meeting point for some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. In Paris, he moved among geniuses like Dalí, Joyce, Huxley, and D. H. Lawrence, orbiting the feverish core of the artistic and literary avant-garde. But his relationship with art was never purely intellectual—it was physical, feverish, a reflection of his relentless pursuit of experiences that defied the limits of the possible. He didn’t just want to create; he wanted to live inside the art, to dissolve into it as if that were the only way to justify his existence.

Crosby lived in constant combustion, burning through every moment with absolute intensity. In the end, he vanished as quickly as he lived, but his shadow remains—a haunting trace of someone who tried to turn life into art, refusing to accept the limits of existence.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a intrigued by Harry Crosby since I first heard about him 20 or so years ago. Was overjoyed to see New York Review Books had republished this old biography of his.

Once one gets past the boring bits at the beginning (a very conventional, very privileged, very boring Boston Brahmin upbringing) it becomes an incredibly fascinating ride. Occasionally impossible to put down, not for the brilliant writing but the story itself. Like watching a train wreck in not-so-slow motion.

It starts to get a bit confusing chronologically about halfway through, as the author moves the chapters forward mainly through people or subjects. Makes sense in many ways though as Harry's last 8 years or so are such a wild ride that a chronological retelling might actually be more confusing.

I have lined up to read Caresse Crosby's autobiography, THE PASSIONATE YEARS, later this year. This book characterizes the autobiography as pretty loose with the facts but capturing the spirit of the time very well. Can't wait.

[Rachel Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is biography as written by a novelist, not a historian. Wolff is a masterful wordsmith. His biography is unconventional and elliptical, often eschewing chronology by circling back over the same times again and again. Wolff describes himself as working within the romantic biographical tradition in the book's 2003 afterword, which is definitely worth reading by anyone interested in biography as a genre. The result of his approach is fascinating and wonderfully readable. The subject, Harry Crosby, is not necessarily likeable (and sometimes, I think Wolff let him off too easily), but his extreme hedonism and his transformation from innocent Bostonian to decadent cosmopolitan are compelling. Wolff's main point, I suppose, is to explain why Harry Crosby killed himself. As someone who has experienced the aftermath of several suicides, this question holds a great deal of meaning to me. Ultimately, I think Wolff does as good a job of answering why as anyone can.

[Stephen Kwiatoski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fine journey through Paris between the wars. Wolff was fortunate in locating and speaking to a number Crosby's friends before the passing of that generation, and with excellent research has written a biography that brings this morbidly elegant, decadently dashing and wild couple to life. There were the parties, group sex, hashish, opium, and a life of no restraint that surrounding Harry Crosby's work as a poet and planned suicide which, Wolff intimates, he undertook to spite, disconcert and cause anguish to his parents and proper Boston. Harry Crosby's gruesome poetry doesn't shine, in Wolff's view, but his subjects life burns bright. Not to be missed if you're interested in the era.

[Xan Asher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone reading this is going to be left with the feeling (hell, I was anyway) of wondering just what made Harry Crosby tick. Possibly (!!) madness. Great portrait of a generation post WW1, Paris in the twenties, and an all-round ultimately homicidal fascinating character. His wife had an amazing post-Harry life; Lisa St. Aubin de Teran wrote a novel based on him, Black Idol. For anyone who enjoys biographies about the quirkier unsung names.

[Kristi]

Rich, bored and American in Paris, Harry Crosby drank, drugged, and debauched his way through the 1920's and '30's. Surrounding himself with artists, writers, and bohemians, he established a small publishing house and gained notoriety not only for his flamboyance, but the writers he supported including James Joyce. An odd, sad story of a bright, narcissistic Peter Pan.

[Raymonds009 · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are not aware of Harry and Caresse Crosby this is the book to get you introduced. They were at the center of the literary world of post-WWI. They are largely forgotten mostly because they lived the life that Fitzgerald and Joyce wrote about. They published the first edition of "Ulysses". There are many rewards here.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story of a little known would be publisher and writer/sun worshiper/Gatsby like playboy and all around freak who tore up Paris in the twenties. It's a very cool book especially if you have any interest in that period

[Mark]

A fascinating topic from the pen of a superlative nonfiction stylist; highly recommended if you're interested in a representative figure of the expatriate community in 1920s Paris.

[John McMullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am unsure just what Mr. Wolff thought of Harry Crosby and that is, to me, an essential component of this fine book.