1. Harry Crosby was an American heir, World War I veteran, bon vivant, poet, and publisher who for some epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature.
61 Facts About Harry Crosby
1. 2.
Harry Crosby was a volunteer in the American Field Service during World War I, and later served in the US Ambulance Corps.
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Profoundly affected by his experience in World War I, Crosby vowed to live life on his own terms and abandoned all pretense of living the expected life of a privileged Bostonian.
4.
Harry Crosby wrote and published poetry that dwelled on the symbolism of the sun and explored themes of death and suicide.
5.
Harry Crosby numbered among his friends some of the most famous individuals of the early 20th century, including Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
6.
Harry Crosby was the product of generations of blue-blood English and Dutch American families, descended from the Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Morgans, and Grews.
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Also among Harry Crosby's ancestors were Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler, and William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
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Harry Crosby had one sister, Katherine Schuyler Crosby, nicknamed Kitsa, who was born in 1901.
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Harry Crosby's mother instilled in him a love for poetry.
10.
Harry Crosby tossed water bombs off the upper stories of the house onto unsuspecting guests.
11.
At age 19, like many young men of upper-crust American society, Harry Crosby volunteered to serve in the American Ambulance Service in France.
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Miraculously, Harry Crosby was unhurt, but Spaulding, following close behind in another ambulance, was struck in the chest by shrapnel.
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Harry Crosby declared later that that was the night he changed from a boy to a man.
14.
Harry Crosby wrote many letters home during the two years he was in France.
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Harry Crosby became in 1919 one of the youngest Americans to be awarded the Croix de guerre.
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On March 21,1919, Harry Crosby left Brest for Boston via Philadelphia and arrived home a hero.
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Harry Crosby took 19 courses, six in French and six in English literature.
18.
Harry Crosby graduated with a bachelor of arts in 1921.
19.
Harry Crosby yearned, though, to escape the rigidity of everyday life in Boston.
20.
Harry Crosby's mother invited Mrs Richard Rogers Peabody to chaperone Harry Crosby and some of his friends at a picnic on July 4,1920, including dinner and a trip to the amusement park at Nantasket Beach.
21.
Harry Crosby was 28, six years older than Crosby, with two small children, and married.
22.
Harry Crosby took a job in Boston at the Shawmut National Bank, a job he disliked, and took the train to visit Polly in New York.
23.
In May 1921, when Polly would not respond to his demands, Harry Crosby threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him.
24.
Later that winter, Polly accepted weekend visits from Harry Crosby, who took the midnight train home to Boston afterward.
25.
On September 2,1922, Harry Crosby proposed to Polly via transatlantic cable, and the next day bribed his way aboard the Aquitania for New York, which made a weekly six-day express run to New York.
26.
Harry Crosby continued his work at Morgan, Harjes et Cie, the Morgan family's bank in Paris.
27.
Harry Crosby said the exercise was good for her breasts.
28.
Polly and Harry Crosby purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then two more in April 1925.
29.
Harry Crosby's inheritance, multiplied by the favorable exchange rate the American dollar enjoyed in postwar Europe, allowed them to indulge in an extravagant expatriate lifestyle.
30.
Still, Harry Crosby repeatedly overdrew his account at State Street Trust in Boston and at Morgan, Harjes, in Paris.
31.
Harry Crosby's father complied, but not without rebuking his son for his spendthrift ways.
32.
Harry Crosby developed an obsessive fascination with imagery centering on the sun.
33.
Harry Crosby met Ernest Hemingway on a skiing trip to Gstaad in 1926.
34.
Harry Crosby often wore a black carnation in his lapel, and was known to color his finger- and toenails.
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Harry Crosby once hired four horse-drawn carriages and raced them through the Paris streets.
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Harry Crosby experimented with photography and saw the medium as a viable art form before it was widely accepted as such.
37.
Harry Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days.
38.
Harry Crosby learned to fly solo in November 1929, when the aeroplane was so new that its spelling had not been agreed upon.
39.
Harry Crosby was the niece of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, and had been married to American diplomat Ray Atherton.
40.
Harry Crosby loved anything risky and was addicted to gambling.
41.
When Constance received a letter from Caresse who confessed that her affair with her husband had made her "very miserable", Constance wrote Harry Crosby and told him she would not see him any more.
42.
Harry Crosby became legendary for his seductive abilities in some social circles in Paris, maintaining relationships with a variety of beautiful and doting young women.
43.
The motif for the ball that year was Inca, and Harry Crosby dressed for the occasion, covering himself in red ochre and wearing nothing but a loincloth and a necklace of dead pigeons.
44.
On July 9,1928, Harry Crosby met 20-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch, the daughter of Arthur and Helen Ludington Rotch of Boston.
45.
Harry Crosby had belonged to the Vincent Club and the Junior League and graduated from Lee School before she had attended Bryn Mawr College.
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Harry Crosby later called her the "Youngest Princess of the Sun" and the "Fire Princess".
47.
Harry Crosby was from a prominent Boston family which first settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1690.
48.
Harry Crosby is twenty and has charm and is called Josephine.
49.
Josephine and Harry Crosby had an ongoing affair until June 21,1929, when she married Albert Smith Bigelow.
50.
Harry Crosby bombarded Crosby with half-incoherent cables and letters, anxious to set the date for their next tryst.
51.
Harry Crosby called their friend Stanley Mortimer at his mother's apartment, whose studio Crosby was known to use for his trysts.
52.
Harry Crosby was still clutching the Belgian automatic pistol in one hand, Josephine in the other.
53.
The coroner reported that Harry Crosby's toenails were painted red, and that he had a Christian cross tattooed on the sole of one foot and a pagan icon representing the sun on the other.
54.
Harry Crosby was the most literary man I ever met, despite the fact that he'd not yet become what you'd call a Writer.
55.
Harry Crosby has greater importance as a co-founder of the Black Sun Press, which Caresse continued to operate after his death.
56.
Harry Crosby established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, that published paperback books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Dorothy Parker, among others.
57.
The paperback books did not sell well, and Harry Crosby Continental closed in 1933.
58.
Malcolm Cowley, whom Crosby had published, wrote in his 1934 book Exile's Return, that the death of "Harry Crosby becomes a symbol" of the rise and fall of the Jazz Age.
59.
Harry Crosby recited the excesses typified by Crosby's extravagant lifestyle as evidence of the shallowness of society during that era.
60.
Harry Crosby wrote and published Poems for Harry Crosby in 1931.
61.
Harry Crosby published and translated some of the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dorothy Parker, among others.