The Jazz Age’s Lost Leader: Harry Crosby
Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald famously lived fabulously and extravagantly during the Jazz Age. So much so, that their antics are still talked about nearly a century later and have come to define the period.
While less famous now, I think the life of poet, publisher, and playboy Harry Crosby actually personified the period best. Working on my latest book, A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris, I found he was one of the more compelling characters to write about.
Like Hemingway, E.E. Cummings and John Dos Passos, he served in the ambulance corps during World War I, and saw his share of carnage and “man’s inhumanity to man,” as he put it in his diary. He narrowly escaped death when his ambulance was blown apart during a German artillery barrage at Verdun. Perhaps, that is why he was so committed to living life to its fullest after the fighting was over. Crosby came from a wealthy Boston family (his uncle was none other than banker J.P. Morgan). He and his recently-divorced lover Caresse (née Mary Phelps Jacob, who also went by “Polly”) married in 1920 and, deciding that America had become too conservative, mundane and stifling, moved to Paris in 1922.