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Information about Kenneth Fearing
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Kenneth Fearing

1902 - 1961

Kenneth Fearing was a journalist, poet, and novelist born in Oak Park in 1902. He attended the University of Wisconsin. In his fictional works, Fearing satirized the middle class, often using savage dialogue.

Modern American Poetry: Kenneth Fearing(external link) prepared and compiled by Cary Nelson

The Kenneth Fearing Web Page not much more than a bilio and biography

Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) was the author of seven novels (including The Big Clock) and seven books of poetry; the film critic for The New Masses; a founding editor of Partisan Review; and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In recent years a growing number of critics have agreed with M. L. Rosenthal's estimation of Kenneth Fearing as "the chief poet of the American Depression." This publication marks the first time all of Fearing's poetry has been collected in one volume.

"To Fearing America was already an all-enveloping nightmare in which he felt trapped like a rat and from which he could not awaken. Fearing's language, which is what you would have heard in a newsroom in the Middle West in the 1930s, plain and ordinary, has a cadence, a music of its own, not borrowed from any English or French literary models, or any other, that's distinctly American." --Carl Rakosi

"No one else so completely immersed himself in the lingo of the mass culture. . . . Kenneth Fearing didn't think like an advertising copywriter. He thought like the advertising copy itself, or at least like a taxi driver reading a billboard while fighting traffic." --Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century

Richards, Tad. Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961)(external link) Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry