33 Facts About Kenneth Fearing

Kenneth Flexner Fearing was an American poet and novelist.

Kenneth Fearing wrote his best-known poems during the late 1920s and 1930s.

Kenneth Fearing moved from Illinois to New York City in 1924, and spent the rest of his life there.

Kenneth Fearing supported himself by writing pulp fiction, often under pseudonyms.

Kenneth Fearing's parents divorced when he was a year old, and they each had custody of him six months of the year.

Kenneth Fearing was raised mainly by his aunt, Eva Fearing Scholl, in the other half of a duplex that the Fearings owned and lived in.

Kenneth Fearing went to school at Oak Park and River Forest High School, where he was voted "wittiest boy and class pessimist".

Kenneth Fearing was the editor of the student newspaper, a position previously held by Ernest Hemingway.

Kenneth Fearing left without graduating, being one class short of a degree.

Kenneth Fearing's heart bled for the grief of the world.

Kenneth Fearing was poor at expressing affection in person and less interested in marriage than Meltzer.

Partly due to Kenneth Fearing's growing alcoholism, he and Rachel divorced in 1941, with Rachel having custody of their son.

Kenneth Fearing stayed at the Yaddo artists' retreat for the first time in 1938 and returned often.

Kenneth Fearing lacked money for much of his life.

Kenneth Fearing's mother had been skeptical of his choice of writing career.

Kenneth Fearing 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.

Kenneth Fearing is buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois.

In December 1924, Kenneth Fearing moved to New York City, joining Latimer, where he pursued a writing career.

Kenneth Fearing enjoyed Maurice Ravel and the painter George Grosz.

Kenneth Fearing was involved in the formation of the League of American Writers in 1935 and worked for its national council in the first year.

Kenneth Fearing participated in the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression, and in 1939 he taught at the New York Writers School.

Kenneth Fearing published five original poetry collections; the remaining three are Dead Reckoning: A Book of Poetry, Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems, and Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems.

Kenneth Fearing was first anthologized in Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing.

Kenneth 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.

Kenneth Fearing commonly uses a particular syntax, which Halliday describes as an "anaphoric elaboration of a subordinate clause that waits in limbo for its controlling statement to arrive".

Kenneth Fearing was well known in 1939, and his first novel, The Hospital, quickly sold six thousand copies.

Wald summarizes the "frightening and fragmented hollowness" that Kenneth Fearing saw in post-war US society and depicted in The Big Clock:.

Kenneth Fearing finds a recording in which her father and his brother argue about the best way to exploit "Mikki", which Ellen ultimately destroys with a gun.

Kenneth Fearing was a founding member of the John Reed Club in 1929, where he was on the editorial board of the communist Partisan Review; he is commonly included among its cofounders after the magazine repositioned itself as anti-Stalinist.

Kenneth Fearing put his name to various pro-Soviet declarations from 1931 through to the 1939 "Open Letter of the 400", which defended Stalin's regime.

Yet Kenneth Fearing's poems were almost never overtly political, and his associates often found him uncommitted to communism.

Wald writes that Kenneth 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".

Kenneth Fearing influenced the Beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg.