Ezra Pound and Caresse Crosby

Anne Conover’s essay focuses on Pound’s working relationship with the publisher, progressive thinker, and benefactress, Caresse Crosby, and her attempt to engage Pound in her own ambitious publishing project, Crosby’s Continental Editions. In the 1920s, Crosby and her husband, Harry Crosby, had founded Black Sun Press, where they produced high end, letter-press limited editions of modernist writers, including James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pound. In the early 1930s, after her husband’s suicide, Crosby turned her attention to developing a trade paperback series, such as the Albatross and Tauchnitz Modern series. As Conover observes, “Crosby was again ahead of her time in anticipating the paperback boom.” Yet the Crosby-Pound correspondence demonstrates that, while he was uncompromising on the editorial front, Pound was equally as demanding that authors, particularly translators, be paid well, demonstrating his diehard cultural commitment, despite the economic realities of publishing. As the imprint lost money, Crosby abandoned the project. Yet she never wavered in her friendship with Pound and (later) with Mary de Rachewiltz. From Conover’s perspective, Pound emerges as a savvy, if idealistic critic of commercial ventures.