Background
He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Henry L. Fearing, a corporation lawyer, and Olive Flexner.
(George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too...)
George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too-scrupulous writer for a New York media conglomerate that bears a striking resemblance to Time, Inc. in the heyday of Henry Luce. One day, before heading home to his wife in the suburbs, Stroud has a drink with Pauline, the beautiful girlfriend of his boss, Earl Janoth. Things happen. The next day Stroud escorts Pauline home, leaving her off at the corner just as Janoth returns from a trip. The day after that, Pauline is found murdered in her apartment. Janoth knows there was one witness to his entry into Pauline’s apartment on the night of the murder; he knows that man must have been the man Pauline was with before he got back; but he doesn’t know who he was. Janoth badly wants to get his hands on that man, and he picks one of his most trusted employees to track him down: George Stroud, who else? How does a man escape from himself? No book has ever dramatized that question to more perfect effect than The Big Clock, a masterpiece of American noir.
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(Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing wro...)
Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing wrote poems filled with the jargon of advertising and radio broadcasts and tabloid headlines, sidewalk political oratory, and the pop tunes on the jukebox. Seeking out what he called “the new and complex harmonies . . . of a strange and still more complex age,” he evoked the jitters of the Depression and the war years in a voice alternately sardonic and melancholy, and depicted a fragmenting urban world bombarded by restless desires and unnerving fears. But, in the words of editor Robert Polito, “Fearing’s poems carry no whiff of the curio or relic. If anything, his poems . . . insinuated an emerging media universe that poetry still only fitfully acknowledges.” This new selection foregrounds the energy and originality of Fearing’s prophetic poetry, with its constant formal experimenting and its singular note of warning: “We must be prepared for anything, anything, anything.” As a chronicler of mass culture and its discontents, Fearing is a strangely solitary figure who cannot be ignored. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
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(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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(Back in Print After Fifty Years Clark Gifford? A cipher....)
Back in Print After Fifty Years Clark Gifford? A cipher. A disaffected, vaguely idealistic politician in a nameless media-driven modern state where representative politics has dwindled to the corrupt transaction of business as usual and a new foreign war is always breaking out. One night Gifford and his followers seize some radio stations and broadcast a call for freedom—a rebellion that is immediately put down by the government and whose motive will remain forever obscure. Even so, it leads to twenty years of war. A paranoid tour de force of political noir, Clark Gifford’s Body skips back and forth in time, interspersing newspaper clippings and court transcripts with the reactions and reminiscences of the politicians, generals, businessmen, journalists, waiters, and soldiers who double as the actors and the chorus in a drama over which, finally, they have no control. Who here is leading? Who is being led? Fearing’s novel is a pseudo-documentary of a world given over to pseudo-politics and pseudo-events, a prophetic glimpse of the future as a poisonous fog. “I have not developed the habit of reading thrillers, but I have read enough of them to know that from now on Mr. Fearing is my man.”–The New Yorker
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He was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Henry L. Fearing, a corporation lawyer, and Olive Flexner.
He attended the Oak Park public schools and the University of Illinois, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a B. A. in 1924.
At Wisconsin he wrote for and edited the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. Before and during his college years Fearing worked as a salesman, a millhand, and a reporter.
Determined to earn his living as a writer, he moved to New York City shortly after graduation and began writing under pseudonyms for pulps like Telling Tales and Captain Billy's Whiz Bang.
The Double Dealer accepted Fearing's first professional work published under his own name, two poems. Most of his early verse appeared in minor publications, but with a friend's help he was successful in placing some work in the New Yorker and in Poetry.
Between 1929 and 1936 Fearing's work appeared primarily in New Masses, Partisan Review, and Menorah Journal. These journals were allied with the American Communist party, and the poems Fearing published in them have been called "proletarian. "
From 1930 to 1933 Fearing was a contributing editor of New Masses, writing movie and book reviews. In 1935-1936 he was a member of the editorial board of Partisan Review. Fearing's first book, Angel Arms (1929), contained sixteen poems on the rigors of city life.
Leftist novelist Edward Dahlberg raised funds to publish Fearing's second collection, Poems (1935), as the first volume in a series by proletarian poets. Horace Gregory considered Fearing's work of this period one of the cornerstones of "beat" poetry, but the poet Kenneth Rexroth has denied that Fearing's verse had any influence on the "beat" generation.
Whatever the influence of his early writing, Fearing's life-style was colorful enough to cause at least three novelists to model characters on him: W. L. River, in The Death of a Young Man (1927); Margery Latimer, in This Is My Body (1930); and Albert Halper, in Union Square (1933). In 1938 Fearing issued Dead Reckoning, followed two years later by Collected Poems, which included sixty-nine of the seventy-eight selections from his first three books and twenty new verses.
Fearing published a novel, The Hospital, in 1939, rapidly following it with two psychological thrillers, The Dagger of the Mind (1941) and Clark Gifford's Body (1942). During the 1940's his poetry appeared regularly in the New Yorker. He published another collection of poems, Afternoon of a Pawnbroker, in 1943. Fearing's most popular novel, The Big Clock (1946), a murder mystery, was made into a movie starring Ray Milland and Maureen O'Sullivan in 1948.
In the same year he issued his last collection of poems, Stranger at Coney Island (1948). The remainder of Fearing's career was devoted to commercial work and fiction. He wrote the novel John Barry (1947) with Donald Friede and H. Bedford-Jones, publishing their work under the pseudonym Donald F. Bedford.
Three other novels, The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), The Generous Heart (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960), appeared under his own name. A final collection of Fearing's verse appeared in 1956. The title, New and Selected Poems, was something of a misnomer, for only four of the poems were new. An introductory essay, "Reading, Writing, and the Rackets, " was sharply critical of McCarthyism.
Fearing expected that the essay would prompt an investigation of his past and spark new interest in his writing, but it did not. In spite of the essay and in spite of the fact that the book was nominated for a National Book Award, sales were sluggish. Over the years Fearing received several awards.
He was given Guggenheim fellowships in 1936 and 1939. Poetry awarded him the Guarantor's prize for "Three Poems" (1940), and in 1944 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him $1, 000 "in recognition of his creative work in literature. "
Fearing's poetry, always aimed at deepening social consciousness, is marked by a robust style and a satirical outlook. Many of the poems use bold images to shock the reader into an awareness of the surroundings, a technique incorporated in titles like "A Dollar's Worth of Blood, " "Lunch With the Sole Survivor, " and "The Juke-Box Spoke and the Juke-Box Said, " as well as in the poetic lines themselves. Horace Gregory has maintained that Fearing's genius lay in transforming the shockers of tabloid journalism into genuine literary art.
(Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing wro...)
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(George Stroud is a hard-drinking, tough-talking, none-too...)
(Back in Print After Fifty Years Clark Gifford? A cipher....)
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These journals were allied with the American Communist party, and the poems Fearing published in them have been called "proletarian. "
Fearing married Rachel Meltzer in 1933; they had one son. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1945 he married Nan Lurie, a painter. They separated in 1958. Fearing died in New York City.