Literary Hub Posts Ann Hulbert's Thoughts on Nathalia Crane

Ann Hulbert is the author of Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies (Picador, 2017). At Literary Hub, readers can read a fragment of the book centered on "Child-Poet Genius of Brooklyn" Nathalia Crane. "Nathalia Crane didn’t just type when she sat down at her typewriter in the book-strewn Brooklyn apartment where she lived with her father, Clarence, a war veteran in his fifties, and her much younger mother, Nelda, who had married him straight out of high school," Hulbert begins. "She beat time with her foot and sometimes took a hand off the keys to slap out a rhythm." From there: 

Her usual good cheer disappeared, her father said of the frail, big-eyed child who at nine had begun to compose her poems this way. “When she is writing she becomes a different girl,” he told a reporter after her first book of startlingly accomplished poetry, The Janitor’s Boy, came out in 1924, the year she turned eleven. “She frowns and is concentrated and will not permit any one to interrupt her.”

Most young bookworms—off in a corner, eyes glued to the page—don’t churn out pages themselves. But the small child who does is bound to pique curiosity. Nathalia’s parents assumed she was blissfully unaware of it, but she belonged to what one critic called a “renaissance of creative genius in girlhood” as the 1920s arrived.

Many adults sat down at their typewriters to muse about this “epidemic,” the term that often surfaced in the press. All across war-weary Europe, the poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer noted as the decade began, prodigious child artists—working with paints or in clay, or with words on the page—were suddenly winning praise.

Read on at Literary Hub.