The Man Who Fell in Love With Death: Harry Crosby's Transit to the Sun

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.