Kenneth Fearing (1902 - 1961)

Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) was the author of seven novels (including The Big Clock) and seven books of poetry; the film critic for The New Masses; a founding editor of Partisan Review; and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In recent years a growing number of critics have agreed with M. L. Rosenthal's estimation of Kenneth Fearing as "the chief poet of the American Depression." This publication marks the first time all of Fearing's poetry has been collected in one volume.

"To [Fearing] America was already an all-enveloping nightmare in which he felt trapped like a rat and from which he could not awaken. Fearing's language, which is what you would have heard in a newsroom in the Middle West in the 1930s, plain and ordinary, has a cadence, a music of its own, not borrowed from any English or French literary models, or any other, that's distinctly American." --Carl Rakosi

"No one else so completely immersed himself in the lingo of the mass culture. . . . Kenneth Fearing didn't think like an advertising copywriter. He thought like the advertising copy itself, or at least like a taxi driver reading a billboard while fighting traffic." --Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century

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