Hart Crane in the context of The Waste Land

Boni & Liveright (pronounced "BONE-eye" and "LIV-right") is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.

It was the first American publisher of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays. In his biography of Horace Liveright, Firebrand, author Tom Dardis noted B&L was "the most magnificent yet messy publishing firm this century has seen." In 1974 Liveright's remaining backlist was bought by W. W. Norton & Company. Norton revived the name as an imprint in 2012 as Liveright Publishing Corporation.

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.

Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city."

While Williams might or might not have said so himself, commentators such as Christoper Beach and Margaret Lloyd have called Paterson his response to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's Cantos. The long gestation time of Paterson before its first book was published was due in large part to Williams's honing of prosody outside of conventional meter and his development of an overall structure that would stand on a par with Eliot and Pound yet remain endemically American, free from past influences and older forms.

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 Black Sun Press was an English-language press noted for publishing the early works of many modernist writers including Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene Jolas. It enjoyed the greatest longevity among the several expatriate presses founded in Paris during the 1920s, publishing nearly three times as many titles as did Edward Titus under his Black Manikin Press. American expatriates living in Paris, Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby (American inventor of the modern bra) founded the press to publish their own work in April 1927 as Éditions Narcisse. They added to that in 1928 when they printed a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. They enjoyed the reception their initial work received, and decided to expand the press to serve other authors, renaming the company the Black Sun Press, following on Harry's obsession on the symbolism of the sun.

They published exclusively limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. During the 1920s and 1930s Paris was at the crossroads of many emerging expatriate American writers, collectively called the Lost Generation. They published early works of a number of writers before they were well-known, including James Joyce's Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (later integrated into Finnegans Wake). They published Kay Boyle's first book-length work, Short Stories, in 1929. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. After Harry died in a suicide pact with one of his many lovers, Caresse Crosby continued the press' work into the 1940s.

White Buildings was the first collection (1926) of poetry by Hart Crane, an American modernist poet, critical to both lyrical and language poetic traditions.

The book features well-known pieces like "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," the "Voyages" series, and some of his most famous lyrics including "My Grandmother's Love Letters" and "Chaplinesque." Harold Bloom has argued that this collection alone, if perhaps taken with his later lyric, 'The Broken Tower,' could have secured Crane's reputation as one of the best American poets of the 20th century.

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.

USS Orizaba (ID-1536/AP-24) was a transport ship for the United States Navy in both World War I and World War II. She was the sister ship of Siboney but the two were not part of a ship class. In her varied career, she was also known as USAT Orizaba in service for the United States Army, and as SS Orizaba in interwar civilian service for the Ward Line, and as Duque de Caxias (U-11) as an auxiliary in the Brazilian Navy after World War II.

Orizaba made 15 transatlantic voyages for the navy carrying troops to and from Europe in World War I with the second-shortest average in-port turnaround time of all navy transports. The ship was turned over to the War Department in 1919 for use as army transport USAT Orizaba. After her service in World War I ended, Orizaba reverted to the Ward Line, her previous owners. The ship was briefly engaged in transatlantic service to Spain and then engaged in New York–Cuba–Mexico service until 1939, when the ship was chartered to United States Lines. While Orizaba was in her Ward Line service, American poet Hart Crane leapt to his death from the rear deck of the liner off Florida in April 1932.

Marguerite Frances Cowley (née Baird; 1890 – September 23, 1970), known as Peggy Cowley and also as Peggy Baird and by her first married name Peggy Johns, was an American landscape painter. She was married to poet-playwright Orrick Johns and writer Malcolm Cowley and was the lover of playwright Eugene O'Neill and poet Hart Crane.