Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

Geoffrey Wolff (Author, Afterword)

Book Description

Series: New York Review Books Classics | Publication Date: August 31, 2003

Includes an afterword by the author

Harry Crosby was the godson of J. P. Morgan and a friend of Ernest Hemingway. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life of the lost generation. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation: these were Crosby's pastimes until 1929, when he shot his girlfriend, the recent bride of another man, and then himself.

Black Sun is novelist and master biographer Geoffrey Wolff's subtle and striking picture of a man who killed himself to make his life a work of art.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"It’s all here: drink, drugs, gambling, unending parties, affected costumes, sun worship, dozens of affairs (chiefly women), and always the undisciplined poetry and the death wish."— Library Journal

"The best biography I have ever read."— James Dickey

"A fascinating biography….Wolff understands his man admirably, sympathizing with him while remaining deeply critical."— The New York Times Book Review

"Crosby emerges as a character as complex and fascinating as Zelda or Alice Toklas, even Ezra Pound….A breathtaking story."— San Francisco Chronicle --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

About the Author

GEOFFREY WOLFF (b. 1937) is the author of three other works of nonfiction—The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara; The Duke of Deception, a memoir; and A Day at the Beach, a collection of personal essays—as well as six novels, most recently The Age of Consent. In 1994 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Wolff is the director of the graduate fiction program at the University of California, Irvine.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (August 31, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590170660
• ISBN-13: 978-1590170663
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #316,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pathology, not sociology, September 29, 2001

By 

Mschwindt (Washington state) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (Paperback)

Wolff wrote this book in reaction to Malcolm Cowley's portrait of Crosby in Exile's Return. Unlike Cowley, Wolff did not find Crosby to be the representative figure for the Lost Generation. He finds Crosby's obsessions with suicide to predate his war service and his interest in the mystic to be Crosby's alone. The book is probably the best possible portrait of a failed poet and wealthy mystic, who happens to have a deathwish, as could possibly be written. So the book is more a study in human pathology than a sociological study of a generation. It's worth reading all the same.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best available work on Crosby, November 19, 1999

By 

"lescaret" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (Paperback)

Geoffrey Wolff's bio of the poet, publisher, and mystic Harry Crosby is a terrific read as well as a singularly important contribution to the unfortunately slender body of scholarship on Harry Crosby. Despite persistent popular and academic interest in 1920s literary Paris, Crosby & the Black Sun Press are generally ignored completely or dismissed as marginal. This is truly puzzling. Wolff's biography, while certainly not uncritical, nevertheless does take the man seriously and offers an absorbing account of the life & work of a true original.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The pleasures of a minor life, September 19, 2003

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Geoffrey Wolff's famous 1976 biography of Harry Crosby--a minor but spellbinding figure of the so-called Lost Generation--was an ideal book for the NYRB Press to revive and reissue. As a literary figure Crosby was certainly exceptionally minor--he was a dreadful and derivative poet, and his reputedly beautiful editions published by his Black Sun Press are hard to reproduce here (and are indeed not). But his life was as fascinating a tale of early 20th-century wealthy decadence as you could wish. The best part opf the narratiove are the earlier sections, explaining how Harry rebelled against his Proper Bostonian past to pursue a live of drugs, drink, sex and lavish spending in Paris between the wars. The details of what harry did once he threw caution adside and did whatever he felt like tend to become monotonous, as stories of decadence often do (everything blurs together). But Wolff has sensitively framed his narrative, and makes a very persuasive case for why Harry was NOT typical of his generation that actuially makes an intriguing point about the kinds of narratives biographers map onto their subjects' lives. And if Wolff's prose is occasionally somewhat empurpled, it could not be more mete to its subject's temperament.