Crane began writing in his teens while living with his grandparents in Cleveland and attending East High School; but later he dropped out of school. His first experience with the sea had set him off in his mid-teens to roam the streets in search of spiritual solace outdoors. In New York, he steamrolled friends with a manic gregariousness that approached hysteria. He played the role of poet in an effort to escape his troubled past.
Crane admired sea verse, the metrics of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde's exotic diction, and Walt Whitman's urban romanticism, but he lacked the control of his first idol and the richness and forthright expression of the other two. He published "C-33" in Bruno's Weekly and "October–November" in The Pagan by age 18. Because he was dependent on handouts from family members, he returned to Ohio in despair to work as a riveter, advertising copywriter, candy store clerk, reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and laborer in a munitions plant while he edited The Pagan. Following his first homosexual affair, he alternated between flights of joy and confrontations with blackmailers.
