O my land, my friends

O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane collects the most significant letters from one of America's most evocative modern poets into a document as passionate, revealing, and ultimately as tragic as Crane's short life. He died at the age of thirty-two. Of the 1200 letters that survive, this edition selects over three hundred that best illustrate the complexity and textures of Crane's life - from family pressures to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality. These letters served as his notebook, his diary, his workshop, and confessional. Preserving ideas, observations, speculations and even drafts of poems, Crane's letters richly document his intelligence and imagination, as well as his alcoholism and self-destruction, more intimately than any biography. And whatever the myth of Crane's indulgences may hold, these letters show that Crane was dedicated as an artist striving to create uniquely American poetry.