Charles Norman, a prolific and influential writer, is best known for his biographies of the poets Christopher Marlowe, E. E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound. Norman was born in Russia on 9 May 1904 and was the youngest of six sons. He was brought to the United States when he was three or four years old and raised in New York City. Having enrolled at New York University in 1921, he left in 1924, as he said in an unpublished interview, "to become a full-time poet, and caught poverty," though he was sustained at first by the patronage of James Buell Munn, then a dean at New York University and later head of the Department of English at Harvard. During the summer of 1923 Norman had journeyed to South America as a seaman on a freighter, and a book of poetry based on his experience, The Far Harbour: A Sea Narrative, was published the...