For literary scholars, Harry Crosby has been an extreme example of the rebellious and dissipated American expatriate of the 1920s. His life more than his writings has gained him a place in literary history. Revealing influences from nineteenth-century romanticism to symbolism, Dadaism and surrealism, his works demonstrate, in microcosm, the course of modernist literary thought and form. His strongest impact was as a publisher: as founders of the Black Sun Press, he and his wife, Caresse Crosby, published modernist writers such as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound.

Harry Crosby was the epitome of the well-bred, well-connected Bostonian. Though he was born Henry Sturgis Crosby, his parents soon changed his middle name to Grew. From his parents, Stephen Van Rensselaer Crosby and Henrietta Marion Grew Crosby, he inherited his patrician good looks and his awareness that he was expected to...