Kenneth Fearing was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son of Harry Lester Fearing, a successful Chicago attorney, and Olive Flexner Fearing. His parents divorced when he was a year old, and he was raised mainly by his aunt, Eva Fearing Scholl. He went to school at Oak Park and River Forest High School, and was editor of the student paper, as was his predecessor Ernest Hemingway. After studying at the University of Illinois in Urbana and the University of Wisconsin, Fearing moved to New York City where he began a career as a poet and was active in leftist politics. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published regularly in The New Yorker and helped found The Partisan Review, while also working as an editor, journalist, and speechwriter and turning out a good deal of pulp fiction. Some of Fearing’s pulp fiction was soft-core pornography, often published under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. A selection of Fearing’s poems has been published as part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project. His complete poetic works, edited by Robert M. Ryley, were published by the National Poetry Foundation in 1994. Kenneth Fearing published several collections of poetry including Angel Arms (1929), Dead Reckoning (1938), Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and other poems (1943), Stranger at Coney Island and other poems (1948), and seven novels including The Big Clock (1946). In 1950, he was subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C.; when asked if he was a member of the Communist Party, he is supposed to have replied, “Not yet.” Kenneth Fearing died in 1961, of malignant melanoma, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. From 1923-1928, Fearing had a relationship with fellow writer Margery Latimer. In 1931, he met Rachel Meltzer, and they married on April 26, 1933. Their only child, poet Bruce Fearing, was born on July 19, 1935. Their marriage collapsed in 1942, partly due to Fearing’s growing alcoholism. They divorced in 1943. Fearing married artist Nan Lurie on June 18, 1945. They separated in 1952.