The editor has prepared a chronology of Crane’s life and works. The last chapter in the Crane biography occurred in 1947. On July 30th of that year, Mrs. Grace Hart Crane, the poet’s mother, died in Teaneck, New Jersey. Before her death, she told Samuel Loveman that she wished to be cremated and her ashes to be cast into the East River from the Brooklyn Bridge. The necessary arrangements were made, and the editor was one of a small party which proceeded along Brooklyn Bridge on a windy, sunlit afternoon in Fall 1947. At intervals on the Bridge, there are signs warning pedestrians not to throw anything from the structure. By the time the party reached the center of the Bridge, considerable trepidation existed about the feasibility of respecting Mrs. Crane’s last wishes. It remained at last for the editor to grasp the small, undecorated tin can and shake the ashes into the air, where they swirled about for a few moments and then fell mistily into the water below. Thus Crane’s mother joined him in the element which had claimed him fifteen years earlier. Crane’s father had died in the Summer of 1931, bringing to an end a similarly complex relationship with his son. Though each bore a great and genuine love for the other, there is little doubt that the divorce of his parents in 1917 tended to separate father from son. Mrs. Crane’s proximity, her emotional nature and her evaluation of her ex-husband’s motives and actions, made it impossible for Crane to suspend himself impartially between both parents as he wished. Instead, he swam into the aura of his mother’s beliefs and reactions. The resulting alienation from his father was not fully surmounted until almost a decade later, for it was not until then that each man grew reconciled to the other’s personality and values. However, it seems unwarranted, if one can say so on the basis of their extensive correspondence, to perpetuate Crane’s own misconceptions of the older man’s values and attitudes in relation to his son prior to 1927. From an early date, the elder Crane was apparently profoundly interested in his son’s choice of a literary career and anxious to have him prepare for it. During 1916 and 1917, for example, he pressed insistently for Hart to enter college, so that the latter might obtain the educational background expected to assist him in functioning as a writer. Although the elder Crane had only studied for a few years at Alleghany College, he had no contempt for education or culture such as marks some self-made practical men. When Hart refused to attend college, Mr. Crane recognized no realistic alternative for his son other than adjustment to the business world and development of his poetic life as an adjunct of his mercantile life. From a non-romantic point of view, Mr. Crane was unfortunately justified. Even in our advanced age, most full-time poets unsupported by private incomes, relatives, or philanthropic gifts either cease writing poetry at all or