From his 1916 arrival in New York's Greenwich Village at the Bank Street apartment rented for him by Alfred Kreymborg, then editor of Others, to his tragic death in 1954 when he and his third wife, Ruth Fagan, were murdered in a slum rooming house near the Bowery by a former mental patient who was convinced that they were Communists, the poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim lived in the dissolute style of a bohemian literatus with such flair and self-destructive energy that his lifelong production of some ten volumes of poetry and fourteen novels from 1918 to 1946 must remain remarkable solely by virtue of the fact that he found the time to write them. Considered a misanthrope and freeloader by friends and enemies alike, this "queerest among the queer" and "yellow-haired child of melancholia," as Kreymborg later remembered him from their first meeting, became something of a bon vivant and redoubtable...