The first biography of Crane to appear in thirty years,
The Broken Tower
reads with all the drama of a psychological novel and the inexorable force of a Greek tragedy.
Few poets have lived as extraordinary and fascinating a life as Hart Crane, the American poet who made his meteoric rise in the late 1920s and then as suddenly flamed out, killing himself at the age of thirty-two and thus turning his life and poetry into the stuff of myth.