American poet Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, the only child of Clarence and Grace Hart Crane. He moved with his family to Cleveland in 1908 and attended Cleveland public schools through the eleventh grade. In 1916, at the age of 17, Crane left school in Cleveland and moved to New York to strike out on his own as a poet and writer. From this point on, until his death in 1932, Crane lived in a number of different places including Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, Isle of Pines, France and Mexico. He supported himself with a variety of writing jobs and publication of his poems, gifts from patrons, allowance from his family and a Guggenheim fellowship.

His major work, The Bridge, is a mystical synthesis of America which connects the country’s past, present and future. For this poem Crane received the Helen Haire Levinson Prize in 1931. While returning from a Guggenheim fellowship in Mexico in April, 1932, Crane lept to his death from the deck of the S.S. Orziba.