• Born: Jul 28, 1902
• Died: Jun 26, 1961
• Active: '40s, '60s, '80s
• Major Genres: Thriller
• Career Highlights: No Way Out, The Big Clock, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Three Wives Too Many
• First Major Screen Credit: The Big Clock (1948)

Biography

Kenneth Fearing is best known today for a single novel, The Big Clock, which was turned into a classic film noir at Paramount in 1948 by director John Farrow and screenwriter Jonathan Latimer, and remade as No Way Out in 1987. Fearing was much better known in his own time, however, as a poet, his poems appearing regularly in many of the leading literary journals and magazines of the 1930s, and he had four successful collections of his work published before he was 40. Born in Oak Park, IL, he was the son of attorney Henry Lester Fearing and journalist Olive Flexner. His mother walked out on the marriage, in favor of returning to her writing career in Chicago, when her son wasn't even a year old, and Fearing was raised by his father and his father's sister. He showed a strong talent as a writer even in high school. While attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he wrote for and edited the school's literary journal. He never graduated, however, due to his failure in a math course in his senior year, though he was granted a degree in 1938, after he was established as an author. He worked as a journalist in Oak Park for a time after leaving college and moved to New York in 1925, first to Staten Island and later to Greenwich Village, living for a time with author Margery Latimer. He earned a living of a kind writing cheap erotic novels, using the name "Kirk Wolf." He also began authoring poetry in his spare time, and later described Walt Whitman as a major influence on his work. It was his poetry that got Fearing his first notice by the literary establishment, when he was published in Poetry and later in the New Yorker. He also wrote for and edited the journal New Masses during the mid-'20s, the period when his preference for leftist politics first became apparent. He remained a contributing editor for New Masses into the 1930s, and it was during this period that Fearing became well known to the public as a writer -- his 1929 poetry collection Angel Arms, a harsh attack on American life and its perceived decline, even amid the supposedly good times of the 1920s, won high critical praise. Further, the book seemed, in retrospect, to reflect some of the same discontents that later manifested themselves among the general public during the Great Depression. The collection was far enough out in front of events and perceptions that it gained popularity in the years immediately following its publication, and Fearing emerged as an important literary voice as the economic ruin of the early '30s set in. As a stylist, Fearing had an extraordinary ear for language and the way people spoke it. He had a knack for mastering and manipulating colloquial English and its slang vernacular without seeming arch or artificial, which informed both his prose and poetry. He was compared favorably to Carl Sandburg and was referred to as one of the best Marxist poets of the 1930s; he was sufficiently well known in literary circles, so that when his ex-paramour Margery Latimer published her novel This Is My Body (1930) -- which today is regarded as a groundbreaking piece of feminist fiction -- he was recognizable as the model for one character in the book. Fearing's second book, Poems, was published in 1935, and received considerable critical acclaim, though it earned nowhere near enough for him to live on. He was always trying to expand his literary horizons and the financial rewards that went with them, but Fearing's first two books of poetry overlapped with his authorship of three unpublished novels. In 1936, Fearing earned a Guggenheim fellowship for his poetry, and was again a recipient three years later -- those awards allowed Fearing and his first wife, Rachel Meltzer, and their son, to live in London for a time, and for him to finish a third collection of poetry, Dead Reckoning. He also completed his first published novel, The Hospital, which was a modest success. Another volume of poetry, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing, was published in 1940, but in the wake of The Hospital's positive reception, he concentrated on fiction for the remainder of his career. His next four books, The Dagger of the Mind (1941), Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and Sherlock Spends a Day in the Country (1944), weren't overly successful, and he did publish a further poetry collection, Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems (1943). In 1946, Fearing published The Big Clock, which created an immediate sensation among aficionados of thrillers and mysteries, and also found appeal within the ranks of mainstream readers. A story involving a writer-hero who finds himself caught in a web of deceit and implicated in a murder, it also carried within its narrative an implicit critique of big business and big capitalism, and of middle-class and upper-class sensibilities. Additionally, its prose had the rhythms and textures of New York City and its people, of all classes and types, within its pages. The film rights to the book were quickly snapped up, and in 1948 Paramount Pictures released a screen adaptation by director John Farrow, starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, George Macready, and Maureen O'Sullivan. The film, with a screenplay by mystery author Jonathan Latimer, became a classic in the fields of mystery and film noir, and beautifully captured the essence of the book. (Curiously, Latimer's screenplay also has merciless "fun" at the expense of its "bohemian" creative characters, mostly embodied by Elsa Lanchester's nutty but well-meaning artist.) Even with this success, Fearing was never able to make a living exclusively from his fiction and poetry. From the 1930s onward, he regularly contributed to various magazines as a literary critic, and he also wrote speeches and advertising copy, the latter principally for philanthropic organizations, including the Muscular Dystrophy Association and the United Jewish Appeal, well into the 1950s. Fearing's first marriage ended in 1941 with a divorce, and in 1946, he married Nan Lurie, a painter -- perhaps not coincidentally, The Big Clock, published that same year, featured a female painter as a key supporting character. That marriage also ended in divorce in 1950. After the success of The Big Clock, Fearing's popularity and reputation faded, possibly as a result of his politics. As a dedicated leftist and pacifist, Fearing reflected those political outlooks in his work during the 1930s, most notably in the 1938 satiric poem "Ad," which presented the opportunity to die in combat in Europe in the vernacular of American advertising. Though he never joined the Communist Party -- reportedly describing the meetings as too boring -- he was a defender of Stalin during the 1930s and early '40s, when that point of view was controversial but not crippling (or uncommon); that history, however, coupled with his always satiric and harsh observations on American life, likely contributed to Fearing's loss of popularity during the 1950s, a much more conservative era. His last books, Loneliest Girl in the World: A Novel (1951), The Generous Heart: A Novel (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960), were unsuccessful and made little impact, and the 1956 volume New and Selected Poems was similarly neglected. Fearing died of cancer in 1961. Ironically, Fearing's name and his poetry turned up on network television in September 1962, in a key part of the script of the lead-off episode of the series Naked City that season, entitled "Hold for Gloria Christmas." Apart from The Big Clock, which has bounced in and out of print for decades, little of Fearing's work was available until 1997, when The Complete Poems was published, signalling a new interest in this lost literary personality of the 1920s and 1930s. He is now regarded as the most important poet of the American Depression. In 1987, The Big Clock was remade at Paramount by director Roger Donaldson as No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, with its story and setting shifted to Washington, D.C. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

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The Big Clock Buy this Movie

(1902-1961)

1929	Angel Arms. Fearing's first published volume introduces his characteristic theme of urban, mechanized society in angry, harshly realistic glimpses. Born in Illinois, Fearing would also publish novels, including The Hospital (1939) and The Big Clock (1946).
1935	Poems. The poet's second collection is a bitter attack on middle-class life.
1938	Dead Reckoning. Fearing's realistic and satirical poems of modern urban life help solidify his reputation as one of the most significant poets of the Depression.
1939	The Hospital. Fearing's first novel treats events in a large metropolitan hospital from multiple perspectives. It would be followed by his first attempt at a thriller, Dagger of the Mind (1941), and Clark Gifford's Body (1942), the story of a modern-day John Brown who attacks a radio station.
1940	Collected Poems. The collection reflects Fearing's leftist and satirical critique of America's preoccupation with wealth and success.
1942	Clark Gifford's Body. Fearing's experimental novel is a modern echoing of John Brown's raid and concerns the abortive seizure of a radio station.
1943	Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems. The poet takes aim at modern urban society in a series of sharply realized portraits. As critic Dudley Fitts observes, "It is a frightening poetry, thank God, a poetry of angry conviction, few manners and no winsome graces."
1946	The Big Clock. The poet and novelist's best-known work is a murder mystery featuring the detective as the one framed for the crime. It would be adapted as a film in 1948 and again in 1987, as No Way Out.
1949	Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems. Criticism of this volume of urban scenes suggests that the poet's best work is behind him, a sentiment that contributes to Fearing's abandonment of poetry for fiction until 1955.

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