He was the prince of excess among the expatriate Americans in Paris in the 1920s. A Boston Brahmin, proprietor of the Black Sun Press, handsome and high-rolling nephew of J. P. Morgan, friend of Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, and Archibald MacLeish, author of a book of poems for his wife and another for his mistress; and, some thought, a madman. That was Harry Crosby. On December 10, 1929, he shot his lover and then himself in a studio in New York’s Hotel des Artistes. Author and critic Wolff records perhaps the strangest of the Lost Generation legends.
At Encyclopaedia Britannica headquarters it was time for Something To Be Done, time for some of the old whizbang called product innovation.