Harry Hibbard Kemp was an American poet and prose writer of the twentieth century. He was known as (and promoted himself as) "the "Vagabond Poet, the Villon

François Villon

François Villon was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison...

 of America, the Hobo Poet, or the Tramp Poet," and was a well-known popular literary figure of his era, the "hero of adolescent Americans."

Life and work

Kemp was born in Youngstown

Youngstown

Youngstown may refer to:A place*Canada**Britannia Youngstown, Edmonton, Alberta**Youngstown, Alberta*United States**Youngstown, Florida**Youngstown, Indiana**Youngstown, New York**Youngstown, Ohio***Youngstown State University...

, Ohio

Ohio

Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

, the only son of a candymaker. He was raised by his grandmother, in a house by the local train yards. At the age of seventeen he left home to become a common seaman; after returning to the United States he traveled across the country by riding the rails as a hobo

Hobo

A hobo is a term which is often applied to a migratory worker or homeless vagabond, often penniless. The term originated in the Western—probably Northwestern—United States during the last decade of the 19th century. Unlike 'tramps', who work only when they are forced to, and 'bums', who do not...

. He later attended the University of Kansas

University of Kansas

The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...

, and while a student he began publishing verse in newspapers and magazines. He spent much of his maturity traveling; he stayed in a number of planned communities for varying lengths of time, then wrote autobiographical novels about his experiences. Kemps Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922) was one of the best selling "tramp autobiographies" of the 1900-1939 period. When not traveling he was a regular denizen of Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and Provincetown on Cape Cod

Cape Cod

Cape Cod, often referred to locally as simply the Cape, is a cape in the easternmost portion of the state of Massachusetts, in the Northeastern United States...

 in Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

, where he was associated with the Provincetown Players

Provincetown Players

The Provincetown Players was an amateur group of writers and artists who, at the early part of the 20th Century, wanted to see a change in American theatre and created a company committed to producing new plays by exclusively American playwrights...

. There is a street named for him, Harry Kemp Way, in Provincetown. Harry Kemp was also known as the "poet of the dunes." Kemp lived on and off in a shack in the dunes of Provincetown, Cape Cod for a period of about 40 years, and he died there in 1960. A 1934 Kemp poem titled, "The Last Return," was written for the Coast Guard men who steadfastly worked to save the lives of those shipwrecked on Cape Cod's coast.

Kemp had a knack for self-promotion, what he called "the Art of Spectacularism," and early learned to collaborate with and manipulate journalists to attract attention to his work. He spent time in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 in the early 1920s, along with the more famous members of the Lost Generation

Lost Generation

The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...

.

Kemp knew many of the bohemian and progressive literary and cultural figures of his generation, including Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Hubbard

Elbert Green Hubbard was an American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher. Raised in Hudson, Illinois, he met early success as a traveling salesman with the Larkin soap company. Today Hubbard is mostly known as the founder of the Roycroft artisan community in East Aurora, New York, an...

, Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...

, Ida Tarbell, Bernarr MacFadden

Bernarr Macfadden

Bernarr Macfadden was an influential American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories...

, Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of...

, Max Eastman

Max Eastman

Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...

, Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...

, Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...

, John Dos Passos

John Dos Passos

John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...

, E. E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...

, and many others. Kemp played a role in the first stage production of O'Neill's earliest play. Kemp was physically imposing, "Tall, broad-shouldered, and robust," and gained a reputation as a lover, sometimes of other men's wives; he was involved in various scandals throughout his career. His part in Upton Sinclair's divorce was especially notorious in its day.

In addition to his original books, Kemp translated a play by Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina was a Spanish Baroque dramatist, poet and a Roman Catholic monk.Originally Gabriel Téllez, he was born in Madrid. He studied at Alcalá de Henares, joined the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy on November 4, 1600, and entered the Monastery of San Antolín at Guadalajara,...

 as The Love-Rogue (1923), and edited The Bronze Treasury (1927), "an anthology of 81 obscure English poets." Kemp's views turned somewhat more conservative with age; he rejected leftist and anarchist sympathies and wrote approvingly of Jesus

Jesus

Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...

 as the "divine hobo" and the "super tramp."

Kemp's reputation had declined into obscurity by the time of his death in 1960; but his role in the history of modern American literature and the American Left

American Left

The American Left consists of individuals and groups, including socialists, communists and anarchists, that have sought fundamental change in the economic, political and cultural institutions of the United States. Although left-wing ideologies came to the United States in the 19th century, there...

 has brought renewed interest and further publication of his work.

Critical Opinion

According to Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961.-Life and career:...

 (editor of Modern American Poetry), Kemp's early collections (The Cry of Youth, The Passing God) are "full of every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is precise and over-polished poetry." Untermeyer's opinion was that Chanteys and Ballads is "riper," with "the sense of personality more pronounced."

Selected works of Harry Kemp

• The Cry of Youth (1914)
• The Thresher's Wife (1914)
• The Passing God: Songs for Lovers (1919)
• Chanteys and Ballads: Sea-Chanteys, Tramp-Ballads and Other Ballads and Poems (1920)
• Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative (1922)
• Boccaccio's Untold Tale and Other One-Act Plays (1924)
• More Miles: An Autobiographical Novel (1926)
• Sea and the Dunes and Other Poems (1926)
• Don Juan's Note-Book (1929)
• The Golden Word (1930)
• Love Among the Cape Enders (1931)
• Mabel Tarner, An American Primitive (1936)
• The Left Heresy in Literature and Life (1939), with Laura Riding
  Laura Riding
  Laura Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.- Early life :...
  
   and Robert Graves
  Robert Graves
  Robert von Ranke Graves 24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985 was an English poet, translator and novelist. During his long life he produced more than 140 works...
  
  
• The Poet's Life of Christ (1946)
• Provincetown Tideways (1948)

External links

• Works by or about Harry Kemp at Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  (scanned books original editions color illustrated)