become embittered producers of occasional pieces. Perhaps Mr. Crane should have supported Hart from his adolescence onward with an allowance sufficient to enable him to write poetry and do nothing else. The moral and psychological results of such beneficence are mixed and problematical. In any event, his young son’s early poetry did not yet reveal the merit which would have called forth a clamorous and effective acclaim to which Mr. Crane might have acceded; furthermore, Mr. Crane did not stem from a wealthy aristocracy to whom a life of cultured leisure is natural rather than phenomenal. Finally, the immediate outward signs of Mr. Crane’s success were somewhat illusory; his business enterprises partook of the overblown quality of 1920-ish prosperity, and were underlaid with an insecurity not conducive to the assumption of a unique personal and financial responsibility. Once Mr. Crane recognized the impossibility of shaping his son’s values, once he accepted the fact that Hart was (as he not unkindly wrote him) a poetic “vagabond,” he generously supplied him with money to the best of his ability and understanding, continually offered him the security of his home, and ultimately left him a large cash bequest and an annual allowance that would have sustained his son under normal circumstances. Crane was in great part responsible for creating the time-worn legend of a hard-hearted father. During the years from 1917 to 1925, less so afterward, he wrote or informed countless friends of the brutality of his father’s behavior, his lack of kindness and generosity, and the suffering this caused. Yet it was during these years that Crane was most uncompromising, patronizing, intransigent, prone to distortion of his father’s image. The correspondence between them, not all of which is included here, is a tragic record of misunderstanding for which neither is to be adjudged guilty. It shows that they were temperamentally alike in many ways: in their humor, their warmth of spirit, their reckless pride, their strong need for freedom. * * * * * The letters have been assembled chiefly from original manuscripts, as well as microfilm and photostat copies, generously made available by their recipients, libraries, and collectors. Herbert Weinstock and William Wright furnished typed copies of letters to them; Samuel Loveman gave typed letters to William Sommer. The editor has been able to examine the papers of Crane and his mother; these provided Crane’s own carbon copies of typewritten letters to his father, Otto H. Kahn, Yvor Winters, Edgell Rickword, Thomas Seltzer, and his stepmother ... letters to his mother and grandmother ... typed copies of several letters to his father and stepmother. Despite the hazards of transcribing manuscript, the editor has striven to attain maximum faithfulness to the original.