Conrad Potter Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia, the eldest of three sons born to William and Anna Aiken. His father was a brilliant Harvard-trained physician and surgeon, his mother the daughter of a radical New England Unitarian minister, William James Potter. When both parents died tragically in a murder-suicide, Conrad, aged eleven, went to live with an aunt in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was educated at Middlesex School, Concord, and at Harvard University, where he received his baccalaureate in 1912. Among his collegiate colleagues were E. E. Cummings, John Reed, T. S. Eliot, Robert Benchley, and Walter Lippman. It is one of the ironic vagaries of the world of letters that Conrad Aiken wrote and published so much and was widely read, yet never gained the national or international fame that was awarded to his Harvard contemporaries. Married three times, Aiken spent many years traveling in Europe or...