From 1927 to 1928, Crane lived in Pasadena, California, where he worked as a personal secretary. His advancement suffered from self-indulgence in alcohol and sex followed by bouts of self-pity and abusive language. He changed his residence frequently, which took him all over Manhattan, particularly Greenwich Village and along the East River overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane completed two symbolic poetry suites: White Buildings (1926), introduced by admirer Allen Tate, and The Bridge (1930), a mystical American epic. These works earned Crane Poetry magazine's Helen Haire Levinson Prize, a 1931 Guggenheim Fellowship, and lasting tribute as a major American poet.
Crane's surge of critical acclaim came too late to rescue him from ruinous debauchery and fistfights, exacerbated by the disapproval of his family and friends. A failed love affair with Peggy Baird Cowley ended Crane's illusion of a heterosexual lifestyle. With the collapse of his plans for an Indian epic, Montezuma, he sank into exaggerated paranoia and made a show of suicide by drinking iodine and mercurochrome. Released from jail for disturbing the peace, he returned from a sojourn in Mexico in low spirits, the result of a quickening of intermittent manias.
With a loan of $200 from his uncle for a subsequent journey, Crane set sail for New York with Cowley on the steamboat Orizaba in April 1932. He leaped into the Gulf of Mexico 300 miles north of Havana at noon on April 27. Whether he was frenzied or truly suicidal, no one could determine. His body was not recovered. A comprehensive anthology, Collected Poems, was issued in 1933, followed in 1972 by Ten Unpublished Poems and in 1986 by The Poems of Hart Crane.
