American poet Kenneth Fearing was born in Oak Park, IL, in 1902. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1924. Moving to Chicago, he held jobs as a salesman and a millhand, among other things, and eventually went to work for a Chicago newspaper as a reporter. He moved to New York City, and began earning a living as a freelance writer. He wrote many stories and novels, but mostly under pseudonyms because his first love was poetry and he only wrote prose for the money.

Politically a progressive, Fearing's poems tended to be more on the gritty, rough-edged side rather than the dreamy, romantic verses commonly associated with poetry; a biographer once noted that Fearing's poems "present a corrosive, weirdly lighted picture of contemporary American life", and a critic once said that his work "reads like nightmares induced by New York newspapers and modern civilization . . . not cheering to read, but it haunts one".