O MY LAND, MY FRIENDS, letters of Hart Crane

Edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber
O My Land, My Friends
The Selected Letters of Hart Crane
Foreword by Paul Bowles

"At times dear Gorham, I feel an enormous power in me — that seems almost supernatural.… I can say this now with perfect equanimity because I am notoriously drunk and the Victrola is still going with that glorious Bolero.… O Gorham, I have known moments in eternity.… I want you to know me as I feel myself to be sometimes.… You know I live for work — for poetry. I shall do my best work later on when I am about 35 or 40."

O My Land, My Friends collects the most significant letters from the poet's copious correspondence into a document as passionate, revealing, and ultimately as tragic as Crane's short life. He died at the age of 32.

Of the 1,200 letters that survive, this edition selects over 300 that best illustrate the complexity and textures of Crane's life — from family pressures, to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality. These letters served as his notebook, his diary, his workshop, and his confessional.

Crane's career began with the Great War and ended with the Great Depression, a fecund period in American arts and letters. He trafficked with many of the most significant figures of the time: Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Katherine Anne Porter, Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Stein, and Yvor Winters, among others.

Langdon Hammer is a professor of English at Yale University and author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism. Brom Weber is the author of Hart Crane: A Biographical and Critical Study, The Letters of Hart Crane, and the editor of The Complete Poems of Hart Crane.

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