Black Sun Press in the context of "Finnegans Wake"

Caresse Crosby (born Mary Phelps Jacob; April 20, 1892 – January 24, 1970) was an American publisher and writer. Time called her the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris." As an American patron of the arts, she and her second husband, Harry Crosby, founded the Black Sun Press, which was instrumental in publishing some of the early works of many authors who would later become famous, among them Anaïs Nin, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Hart Crane, and Robert Duncan. She was also the recipient of a patent for the first successful modern bra.

Harry Crosby (June 4, 1898 – December 10, 1929) was an American poet and publisher regarded as a figure of the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J. P. Morgan, Jr. As such, he was heir to a portion of a substantial family fortune. He was a volunteer in the American Field Service and later served in the U.S. Ambulance Corps, narrowly escaping with his life. Profoundly affected by his experience in World War I, Crosby vowed to live life on his own terms as a bon vivant, and abandoned all pretense of living the expected life of a privileged Bostonian. In 1920 he met and married Caresse Crosby; their affair was the source of scandal and gossip among blue-blood Boston. He and Caresse subsequently left for Europe, where they devoted themselves to art and poetry.

The couple enjoyed a decadent lifestyle, drinking, smoking opium regularly, traveling frequently, and having an open marriage. In the late 1920s, Crosby wrote and published poetry that dwelt on solar symbolism and mysticism, and explored transgressive themes of sexual intercourse, pagan worship, sacrifice, death and suicide. He numbered among his friends some of the most famous individuals of the early 20th century, including Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Caresse founded the Black Sun Press with Harry, with it being the first to publish works by several authors who became famous, including Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, James Joyce, René Crevel and Kay Boyle. Crosby died in 1929 alongside his new partner Josephine Noyes Rotch, committing a murder–suicide which was speculated as being a suicide pact.

The Bridge, first published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press, is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at a long poem. (Its primary status as either an epic or a series of lyrical poems remains contested; recent criticism tends to read it as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the "modernist epic.")

The Bridge was inspired by New York City's "poetry landmark", the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane lived for some time at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, where he had an excellent view of the bridge; only after The Bridge was finished did Crane learn that one of its key builders, Washington Roebling, had once lived at the same address.