Maxwell Bodenheim

Maxwell Bodenheim , 1893-1954, American novelist and poet, b. Hermanville, Miss. His poetry, which incorporates many techniques of the imagists , is cynical and often dwells on the grotesque. Important volumes of his verse are Minna and Myself (1918), Against This Age (1925), and Selected Poems 1914-1944 (1946). Bodenheim's novels, although savagely realistic and often brutal, contain great energy, humor, and an occasional streak of evangelism. They include Blackguard (1923), Replenishing Jessica (1925), and Georgia Man (1927). For many years a fixture of the bohemian scene in New York City's Greenwich Village, Bodenheim slipped into alcoholism and poverty in the 1940s. In Feb., 1954, he and his third wife were found murdered in a furnished room belonging to Harold Weinburg, who confessed to killing them and was found insane.

Bodenheim, Maxwell (1893–1954), born in Mississippi, moved to Chicago and then to New York, where he published Minna and Myself (1918), a volume of poems using the sharply pictorial technique of Imagism. The highly mannered use of language and the author's posturing as an aesthetic misanthrope is also evident in such later verse as Advice (1920), Introducing Irony (1922), Against This Age (1923), The Sardonic Arm (1923), Returning to Emotion (1927), The King of Spain and Other Poems (1928), Bringing Jazz (1930), and Lights in the Valley (1942). Bodenheim's novels, including Crazy Man (1924), Replenishing Jessica (1925), Sixty Seconds (1929), and Naked on Roller Skates (1931), show a similar vivacious cynicism, iconoclasm, and jazz‐age paganism. He wrote several plays, including The Master‐Poisoner (1918), with Ben Hecht, who later attacked him in his fiction. Always a bohemian drifter and drinker, he spent his last years in squalor and was murdered.