[Young Richard Eberhart] held a number of jobs connected with slaughterhouses and meat-packing, which may well have contributed to the death-obsession in his poetry, though there was a more crucial experience as well. A poem written in his late forties, "Fragment of New York, 1929," is a superb instance of the persistence of these early impressions. Certain reverses arising from a monumental embezzlement by the Hormel treasurer—the subject of Eberhart's play The Visionary Farms—all but ruined the family [his father was vice president of that company] when Dick was eighteen. At about the same time his mother died of lung cancer….

Richard seems to have been very close to his mother, and tended her during her terrible illness. The experience became a powerful element in his sensibility. It forced the relationship, and left the young man with a surfeit of death-horror, a vision of life's morbid depths...