Poet. He was an American poet of the early 20th century who understood that he was a homosexual after an affair in 1919 in Akron, Ohio, where he was employed as a clerk in one of his father's candy stores. In the spring of 1924, he met Emil Opffer, a ship's purser. With him, an emotional relationship developed in which Crane was intensely engaged. The 1927 collection entitled "Voyages: Six Poems" were fashioned as an extraordinary souvenir of their temporary union. Other books of his are "The Bridge" in 1929 and "Chaplinesque" in 1926, which related to actor Charlies Chaplin. Born Harold Hart Crane, the son of Clarence Crane, the owner of Crane's Chocolate Company, and his first wife Grace Hart, he had a stressful relationship with his parents, who had an unhappy marriage, and spent many years living with his grandmother. In 1916 he left school without graduating to enter Columbia University in New York City on an entrance exam, but abandoned further formal education altogether in an attempt to start a literary career. With a knowledge of art, he wrote for various periodicals along with being financially supported by his parents. By 1917, he was publishing poems in magazines, such as "Broom," "The Dial," " Poetry," and "Secession." During World War I, he worked in a munitions plant in Chicago as he was too young to serve active military. In 1917 his parents divorced and his father remarried the next year. His mother had left him an inheritance. After the war, he held positions at a few newspapers and magazines before returning to his father's candy business, but had a severe disagreement to the point that his father disinherited him and did not speak to him for two years. He returned to New York City. In 1922 he published his first collection, "White Buildings." "Black Tambourine," a poem from this collection, was about a Black man, who worked for his father's candy factory. Another poem, "Episode of Hands," describes a factory accident involving an employee's hand. In 1928 his grandmother died and soon after, his father and stepmother, which led to depression. In 1931 he received a Guggenheim fellowship with intentions of studying European culture, yet committed suicide while he was returning to New York City from Mexico by leaping from the deck of "S.S. Orizaba" somewhere off the Florida Coast. Some witnesses reported that he shouted, "Goodbye, everybody," before leaping over the rail. His body was never recovered. There is a cenotaph for him at his father's gravesite in Garrettsville's Park Cemetery.