Kenneth Fearing

Birthday: 28 July 1902, Oak Park, Illinois, USA

Birth Name: Kenneth Flexner Fearing

American poet Kenneth Fearing was born in Oak Park, IL, in 1902. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1924. Moving to Chicago, he held jobs as a salesman and a millhand, among other things ...Show More

American poet Kenneth Fearing was born in Oak Park, IL, in 1902. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1924. Moving to Chicago, he held jobs as a salesman and a millhand, among other things, and eventually went to work for a Chicago newspaper as a reporter. He moved to New York City, and began earning a living as a freelance writer. He wrote many stories and novels, but mostly under pseudonyms because his first love was poetry and he only wrote prose for the money.Politically a progressive, Fearing's poems tended to be more on the gritty, rough-edged side rather than the dreamy, romantic verses commonly associated with poetry; a biographer once noted that Fearing's poems "present a corrosive, weirdly lighted picture of contemporary American life", and a critic once said that his work "reads like nightmares induced by New York newspapers and modern civilization . . . not cheering to read, but it haunts one". Hide