Kenneth Fearing

Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois, to a successful family: his father was Harry Lester Fearing (d. 1940), a successful Chicago attorney and descendant of the family of Calvin Coolidge. His mother Olive Flexner Fearing was of Jewish descent and a cousin of the educator Abraham Flexner. As a young man Fearing was thin, with dark hair and skin, and liked to wear dark suits. His voice was low and lispy. He had a "little-boy appeal", with messy hair and habits, horn-rimmed glasses, and an immature disposition—some of which may be seen in Alice Neel's oil portrait, painted in 1935, which is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The portrait includes some references to Fearing's poetry and shows a small skeleton in his chest, grasping his heart and pouring blood from it; Neel commented that "He really sympathized with humanity ... His heart bled for the grief of the world." After his death, according to Robert M. Ryley, friends remembered "his charm, his eloquence, his almost courtly manners, his prickly independence, his not-quite-hidden vulnerability and innocence—but mostly they would remember his gloomy, sardonic skepticism". They separated in 1952. This was his last marriage. Fearing lacked money for much of his life (the period following his most successful novel was the exception). In New York, he received a monthly allowance from his mother until 1935, when she decided that her son should bear full responsibility for his new child. His mother had been skeptical of his choice of writing career. He also relied on gifts from his father and loans from Latimer in those years. He held few full-time jobs for more than a few months, despite claiming, apparently falsely, to have worked as a salesman, a journalist, and even a lumberjack in press materials. In the 1950s, he worked for the "Books" section of Newsweek magazine (1952–1954), and, during his single longest period of employment, he developed press material and annual reports for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America (1955–1958). Still, he lived in poverty in the 1950s, and had smoked and drank heavily for most of his life, which seriously affected his health in his last years. In early 1961, he felt a sharp pain in his back that worsened through June, when his son Bruce moved in to care for him. They went to Lenox Hill Hospital on June 21, and five days later Fearing died of a melanoma of his left chest and pleural cavity. He is buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois. ==Literary career==

In December 1924, Fearing moved to New York City, joining Latimer, where he pursued a writing career. His friend the poet Horace Gregory noted that his early writing was not particularly successful, but Fearing was particularly determined to make a living in writing. Meanwhile, he searched for editors who would publish his poetry. Fearing told a writers' convention in 1948 that "Literature is a means for crystallizing the myths under which society lives." His poetic influences included Walt Whitman, who he said was "the first writer to create a technique indigenous to the whole of this country's outlook", His early poems were published in magazines such as Poetry, ''Scribner's, The New Yorker, the New Masses, Free Verse, Voices, and The Menorah Journal. He was first anthologized in Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing'' (1940). Fearing was most productive, and his future most bright, between 1938 and 1943, when he published a book of poetry or a novel each year. Even then, his royalties during this period were minimal, and only exceeded the publisher's advance on two occasions (the Collected Poems and the novel The Hospital). Despite the fame, he remained dependent on his wife Rachel's income. The language of mass media similarly intrudes in "Jack Knuckles Falters" (1926), in which a war veteran has been sentenced to death for murder. In his final words, he struggles with his competing needs to proclaim his innocence and meet his death with "dignity". Newspaper headlines that cover his execution interrupt each stanza and undermine his speech: "" They convey nothing of his personal struggle but rather satisfy the public's need for a simple narrative in which a "criminal" is punished. The headline has moved on to another topic as the man proclaims his innocence.—Fearing turned to novels. Between 1939 and 1960 he wrote seven mystery or "thriller" novels, although their formal qualities defy simple genre categorization. The most significant are The Hospital (1939), Dagger of the Mind (1941), ''Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and The Big Clock'' (1946). Fearing was well known in 1939, and his first novel, The Hospital, quickly sold six thousand copies. A power outage at a hospital, caused by a drunk janitor, is the central event around which numerous characters' lives are portrayed. Each chapter is devoted to one character's point of view, a style common to all of Fearing's novels. It was critically well-received, and was popular enough that a Bantam paperback and an Armed Services Edition soon followed. It remains in print. The novel was developed into a film of the same name in 1948, and again in 1987 (No Way Out). The novel earned Fearing $60,000 from republication and film rights. His financial success was short-lived, as income from the novel dried up due to the unfavorable contracts that he had negotiated himself. The Crozart Story (1960) is about the heads of two rival public relations firms. Fearing has one PR head explain how he shaped public opinion: "The fantasies we were adroitly joining and fashioning into loaded rumors, those gossamer rumors we were transmuting into triggered press releases, those childlike releases we were everywhere implementing with public degradation, internal exile, imprisonment, those incandescent anxieties we were molding and hardening into death's-head taboos—all these components of the commando raids we were mounting for the world's richest haul consisted of words, basically, only words." Politics Accounts vary as to Fearing's degree of association with Marxism and the American Left. he is commonly included among its cofounders after the magazine repositioned itself as anti-Stalinist. He put his name to various pro-Soviet declarations from 1931 through to the 1939 "Open Letter of the 400", which defended Stalin's regime. Wald writes that Fearing had "a mistrust of all political premises and a disbelief in all ameliorative options, [which] ran contrary to any connection with a large organization that demanded ideological conformity and an activist commitment". In the era of McCarthyism his political associations were sufficient for him to be interviewed by the FBI and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The FBI reported that "[Fearing said] he had become a 'fellow traveler' in 1933, and that prior to that time he had not been very interested in the meetings of the John Reed Club due to the fact that he was not interested in the politics discussed at all the meetings." ==Legacy==

The literary critic Macha Rosenthal called Fearing "the chief poet of the American Depression". Since Fearing's death, critics have offered more positive appraisals of his later poetry. In a 1970 article on the "Dynamo" school of poets, Estelle Novak wrote, "Fearing's true appeal as a revolutionary poet was his ability to combine realistic description and political comment in the form of a readable poem that lost nothing of its quality as poem while it gained in propaganda value." By the 1990s there was a "minor revival", with the National Poetry Foundation's publication of Kenneth Fearing Complete Poems in 1994, and the poet Mark Halliday published an essay, "Damned Good Poet: Kenneth Fearing" (2001), which included an analysis of the poet's themes. A selection of Fearing's poems has been published as part of the Library of America's American Poets Project. ==Bibliography==