‘Mexico killed Hart’, declared fellow Guggenheimer Lesley Simpson, in one of the crudest summaries of Crane’s final year. Crane’s time in Mexico has generally been considered to have been deeply unproductive and self-destructive. He arrived in Vera Cruz from New York, via Havana, on 12 April 1931, making his way to Mexico City by train. His trip was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship – the only major award of his career. Dispatched to the committee on 29 August 1930, Crane’s application outlined a vague plan to explore European literary traditions ‘classical and Romantic’ (his ‘plans for work’ section simply requested ‘European study and creative leisure for the composition of poetry’). His resulting work, he wrote, would contrast European strands of influence with ‘emergent features of a distinctly American poetic conversation’, continuing themes from The Bridge and his negotiation with Eliot. Crane’s application was supported by references from Waldo Frank, Otto Kahn and Eda Lou Walton, a professor of English at NYU. Crane was informed of his success in a letter dated 13 March 1931. At the last minute, however, after discussions with recent returnees Malcolm Cowley and Waldo Frank (Frank having published America Hispana that January), Crane spontaneously decided to travel to Mexico. He hoped to research and write a long poem that he had first imagined during work on The Bridge, centring on Cortés’s violent colonisation of Mexico. Crane met with the Guggenheim Foundation Fund’s principal administrator, Henry Allen Moe, and was assigned to a group of Latin American Fellows.

The Guggenheim was one of a handful of markers that Crane’s reputation was rising. In the last years of his life he published in nationally distributed, mass-circulation magazines and was featured in Vanity Fair in 1929. This chapter discusses this shift in his reputation through an examination of his engagement with the ‘smart journals’, his attempts to raise his profile as a reviewer with new commissions at Poetry, and his drawing together of Key West: An Island Sheaf.

Crane’s letters, read alongside ‘Nopal’ which I have identified in the archive of his friend, former IRA Assistant Chief of Staff Ernie O’Malley, offer their own resistance to the prevailing narrative of his time in Mexico City, and the ease with which this year has been read back retrospectively from his death in April 1932.