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Girl Wonder: Nathalia Crane, Poetic Prodigy of the 1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2021

PAUL BRADLEY BELLEW
PAUL BRADLEY BELLEW*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, Fu Jen Catholic University. Email: paul.b.bellew@gmail.com.
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Abstract

Largely forgotten today, from approximately the late 1910s through the 1930s, at least a dozen young girls brought out numerous books in the US. But there was one girl who was particularly talented and successful: Nathalia Crane, who published her first collection of poetry when she was just eleven years old in 1924. This article analyzes both her work and her reception from her first success through the subsequent controversy over her authorship instigated by a local Brooklyn newspaper. In the process, the article demonstrates the complicated connections between perceptions of girlhood and women's sexuality as they relate to political agency in the early twentieth-century United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 38 - 64
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 However, Crane was aware and disappointed with Coolidge's decision since her father was a World War I veteran.

2 Nunally Johnson, “One Word after Another,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 5 Jan. 1924, 20.

3 Ibid., 20.

4 Leamy, Edmund, “Afterword,” in Crane, Nathalia, The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924), 81–82Google Scholar, 81.

5 “Nathalia Crane Got $500 for $100,000 Books, Says Father, Asked to Account,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 Nov 1925, 1–2, 1.

6 Tanselle, G. Thomas, “The Thomas Seltzer Imprint,” Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 58, 4 (1964), 380–448CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 403.

7 Johnson, Nunnally, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” American Mercury, 9, 33 (Sept. 1926), 52–59Google Scholar, 56.

8 “Daisy Ashford Is Dead at 90; Wrote ‘Young Visiters’ at 9,” New York Times, 18 Jan. 1972, 34.

9 Michelle Dean, “Opal Whiteley's Riddles,” New Yorker, 23 August 2012, at www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/opal-whiteleys-riddles.

10 In 1920, Hilda Conkling's Poems by a Little Girl was brought out by her mother, poet Grace Hazard Conkling, who had transcribed her daughter's turns of phrase from the age of four to nine as free-verse poetry. In 1921, fifteen-year-old Vivienne Dayrell's collection Little Wings was published, including work she had published in periodicals since 1918. In 1923, twelve-year-old Helen Adam published The Elfin Peddlar. Also in 1923, Mary Virginia Harriss published Blue Beads and Amber, comprising poems written between the ages of four and eleven. In 1927, Barbara Newhall Follett published her first novel House without Windows at just twelve years of age. In 1928, Muriel Hodder published Pax the Adventurous Horse at age eleven.

11 In David Sadler, “Innocent Hearts: The Child Authors of the 1920s,” Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 17, 4 (1992), 24–30, Sadler notes three boy writers from the period – Horace Atkisson Wade, David Putnam, and William J. Marsh Jr. – but even so these boys are in a distinct minority in the eighteen total child authors he cites, and none reached the notoriety of Ashford, Whitely, or Crane.

12 “Markham v. Prodigy,” Time, 23 Nov. 1925, 32–33, 33.

13 James C. Young, “Child Poet Explains Her Lines ‘Just Come’; Nathalia Crane Says She Reads Dictionaries, and Feels ‘Words Have Souls’ – Beats Time with Foot and Hands,” New York Times, 22 Nov. 1925, 8.

14 See Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962)Google Scholar. In this book, which is typically understood to represent the advent of childhood studies as a field, Ariès discusses the medieval family structure and argues that in that era there was essentially no such thing as childhood as it was known in the twentieth century, and, by extension, any notions of it are in fact social constructs.

15 James, Allison and Prout, James, “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood?”, in James, and Prout, , eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Routledge Falmer, 2015), 6–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 7.

16 Mills, Richard, “Perspectives of Childhood,” in Mills, Jean and Mills, Richard, eds., Childhood Studies: A Reader in Perspectives of Childhood (London: Routledge Falmer, 2002), 7–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 9.

17 Allison James and James Prout, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in James and Prout, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, ix–xvii.

18 James, Allison, Jenks, Chris, and Prout, James, “Theorizing Childhood,” in Jenks, Chris, ed., Childhood: Critical Concepts in Sociology (London: Routledge, 2005), 143–44Google Scholar. See also Oswell, David, The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Google Scholar; and Esser, Florian, Baader, Meike S., Betz, Tanja, and Hungerland, Beatrice, eds., Reconceptualizing Agency and Childhood: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies, (London: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Mitchell, Claudia, Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline, and Kirk, Jackie, “Editorial: Welcome to This Inaugural Issue of Girlhood Studies,” Girlhood Studies, 1, 1 (Summer 2008), v–xiiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar, ix.

20 Mandrona, April, “Ethical Practice and the Study of Girlhood,” Girlhood Studies, 9, 3 (Winter 2016), 3–19Google Scholar, 3.

21 Ibid.

22 Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, “How to Study Girl Culture,” in Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, eds., Girl Culture: An Encylopedia, Volume II (Westport, CT: Greenwod Press, 2007), 17–24, 17.

23 Anna Mae Duane, “Introduction,” in Duane, The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013) 1–14, 5.

24 Ibid., 10.

25 Barbara Arneil, “Becoming versus Being: A Critical Analysis of the Child in Liberal Theory,” in Davis Archard and Colin M. Macleod, eds., The Moral and Political Status of Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 70–94.

26 Caroline Levander, Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W. E. B. Du Bois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

27 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 75.

28 For a detailed history of enfranchisement in US history see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, (Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2009).

29 Corinne Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

30 For a detailed account of the women's rights movement in the US, including suffrage, see Eleanor Flexner, A Century of Struggle: The Women's Right's Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

31 Martha Patterson, “Introduction,” in Patterson, ed., The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 1–28, 1.

32 Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 98.

33 Ibid.

34 John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 240.

35 Ibid., 241.

36 Sadler, “Innocent Hearts,” 26.

37 Juliet McMaster, “‘Adults’ Literature,’ by Children,” Lion and the Unicorn, 25, 2 (April 2001), 277–99, 281.

38 Cathryn Halverson, “Reading Little Girls’ Texts in the 1920s: Searching for the ‘Spirit of Childhood’,” Children's Literature in Education, 30, 4 (Dec 1999), 235–48, 239.

39 Ibid.

40 Nunnally Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” American Mercury, 9, 33 (Sept. 1926), 52–59, 53.

41 Raymond Schroth, The Eagle and Brooklyn: A Community Newspaper, 1841–1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 3.

42 “Kipling and Red-Headed Boy Her Inspiration, Girl, 9, Woos Muse; Develops Poetic Gift,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 14 Jan 1923, B3.

43 Ibid.

44 Johnson would eventually become a successful Hollywood writer, director, and producer – with films such as 1940's The Grapes of Wrath, 1957's The Three Faces of Eve, and 1967's The Dirty Dozen on his rather extensive résumé.

45 Nunnally Johnson, “I Love the Red-Headed Boy!”, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 25 Feb. 1923, 9.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Nathalia Crane, “The Janitor's Boy,” in Crane, The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1924), 23, l. 1.

49 Ibid., ll. 3–4.

50 Ibid., ll. 5–8.

51 Ibid., ll. 11–12.

52 Ibid., ll. 17–20.

53 Ibid., ll. 13–16.

54 Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press), 2010, 65.

55 Johnson, “I Love the Red-Headed Boy!”.

56 Sadler, “Innocent Hearts,” 26.

57 Quoted in ibid., 26.

58 Amy Lowell, “Preface,” in Hilda Conkling, Poems by a Little Girl (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1920), vii–xix, xi.

59 Nunnally Johnson, “Nathalia at Ten,” in Crane, The Janitor's Boy, xvii.

60 “Kipling and Red-Headed Boy.”

61 Nathalia Crane, “The Flathouse Roof,” in Crane, The Janitor's Boy, 25, ll. 9–10.

62 Ibid., ll. 1–2.

63 Ibid., ll. 3–4.

64 Ibid., ll. 17–20.

65 Ibid., ll. 7, 8

66 Nathalia Crane, “The Battle on the Floor,” in Crane, The Janitor's Boy, 45–46, ll. 4, 2.

67 “Nathalia Crane Got $500,” 2.

68 Nathalia Crane, “Lava Lane,” in Crane, Lava Lane and Other Poems (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1925), 3–6, ll. 1–4.

69 Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” 52.

70 “Nathalia Crane Got $500,” 2.

71 Nathalia Crane, “The First Reformer,” in Crane, Lava Lane, 37–38, ll. 1–4.

72 Ibid., ll. 5–6.

73 Ibid., ll. 9–12.

74 Ibid., ll. 41–44.

75 “Nathalia Crane Got $500,” 1.

76 Ibid.

77 Sadler, “Innocent Hearts,” 27.

78 Juliet McMaster, “What Daisy Knew: The Epistemology of the Child Writer,” in Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster, eds., The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51–69, 53.

79 Ibid., 55, original emphasis.

80 “Nathalia Crane's Poems Puzzle Teachers after Noting Her Class Work,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 10 Nov 1925, 3.

81 Ibid.

82 “Edwin Markham Brands Nathalia Crane's Authorship a Hoax,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 13 November, 1925, 1.

83 Ibid.

84 Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” 54.

85 Schroth, The Eagle and Brooklyn, 133, 135.

86 Ibid., 135.

87 Nunnally Johnson, “Recollections of Nunnally Johnson,” interview by Tom Stempel, UCLA, 1969, at https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofn00john/page/n5/mode/2up, 8.

88 Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” 55.

89 Schroth, 135.

90 Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” 57.

91 Richard Colles Johnson and G. Thomas Tanselle, “‘Little Blue Books’ as Bibliographical Problem,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 64, 1 (First Quarter 1970), 29–78, 42. While today the Little Blue Book serial is almost unheard of, in the 1920s and 1930s the cheap, pocket-sized pamphlet series was familiar in most middle- and working-class households; indeed, over the course of thirty-two years in business, the company sold over 500 million small books. For more information on the influence of these books see Dale Herder, “Haldeman-Julius, the Little Blue Books, and the Theory of Popular Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture, 4, 4 (Spring 1971), 881–93, 883; and Eric Schocket, “Proletarian Paperbacks: The Little Blue Books and Working-Class Culture,” College Literature, 29, 4 (2002), 67–78, for more information.

92 Faye Landskov, “Clement Wood,” Big Blue Newsletter, Q-III (2004), at https://mafiadoc.com/big-blue-newsletter-marxists-internet-archive_59eddb7e1723ddc6d425fbb8.html, 4.

93 Clement Wood, “Nathalia Crane's Poems Credited to Father in Clement Wood's Analysis,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 Nov 1925, A21.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid.

96 Gloria Goddard, “Nathalia Crane's Father Dominating Influence in Child's Life,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 23 Nov. 1925, 3.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid.

103 Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” 59.

104 Ibid.

105 Nathalia Crane, “The Warming Pan,” in Crane, Lava Lane, 47–48, ll. 1–4.

106 Ibid., ll. 5–8.

107 Ibid., ll. 9–12.

108 Ibid., ll. 13–16.

109 Ibid., ll. 21–24.

110 “Nathalia Crane's Father Again Refuses Scientific Test of 12-Year-Old Poet,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 20 Nov 1925, 1.

111 Johnson, “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” 57.

112 “Markham v. Prodigy,” 32.

113 Feldman, David and Goldsmith, Lynn, Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigy and the Development of Human Potential (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991), 5Google Scholar.

114 Hulbert, Ann, Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (New York: Knopf, 2018), 85–87Google Scholar.