Contemporary readers who know about Bodenheim (if at all) only through having scanned a few notorious book titles such as Replenishing Jessica (1925) or Naked on Roller Skates (1930), or from having read the frequently apocryphal anecdotes about his peccadilloes during the 1920s and about his ghastly final years and death, should realize that he was early in his career considered one of the bright promises of American literature. His poetry and criticism were highly regarded by contemporaries such as Ezra Pound and Conrad Aiken, and his fiction, while not nearly as well crafted as the best of his verse, presents a substantial portrait of harassed individuals confronting the development and decay of twentieth-century urban life in America.

Born to Jewish parents in Hermanville, Mississippi, Bodenheim and his family moved around 1900 to Chicago, where the rejection of authority that was so much a part of his life as an individual...