author
Nathalia Crane
1913–1998
A child poetry sensation in the 1920s, she went on to build a long career as a writer and teacher. Her early fame began with verses written in Brooklyn and published while she was still very young.
1 Audiobook
The Janitor's Boy, and Other Poems
by Nathalia Crane
About the author
Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Nathalia Crane became famous as a child prodigy after newspapers and readers discovered the poems she had begun writing at an unusually young age. Her first book, The Janitor's Boy, was written when she was about ten and helped make her one of the best-known young poets of her day.
Crane did not remain only a literary curiosity. She continued writing as an adult, publishing poetry, novels, and work in several genres, and later taught literature at San Diego State University. That longer career gives her story a wider shape: not just a gifted child, but a lifelong working writer.
She died in 1998. Today she is often remembered both for the amazement that greeted her early poems and for the way she carried that early promise into a sustained life in books and teaching.