Menorah Journal. About 44 of his poems were published before his first book of poetry came out. He was involved in the formation of the League of American Writers in 1935 and worked for its national council in the first year. He participated in the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression, and in 1939 he taught at the New York Writers School. Poetry Fearing's first book of poetry, Angel Arms (1929), was dedicated to Margery Latimer and had an introduction by Edward Dahlberg. The next book, Poems (1935), was a success and won him the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships (the fellowship was renewed in 1939). These two volumes contain some of his best-known poems, such as "Jack Knuckles Falters", "1935", "X Minus X", and "Dirge". He published five original poetry collections; the remaining three are Dead Reckoning: A Book of Poetry (1938), Afternoon of a Pawnbroker and Other Poems (1943), and Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems (1948). While his early poetry was well received, critics began to find his work repetitive in the 1940s. He was first anthologized in Collected Poems of Kenneth Fearing (1940). Fearing was most productive, and his future most bright, between 1938 and 1943, when he published a book of poetry or a novel each year. Even then, his royalties during this period were minimal, and only exceeded the publisher's advance on two occasions (the Collected Poems and the novel The Hospital). Despite the fame, he remained dependent on his wife Rachel's income. Poetic themes and style His poetry is concerned with "a society that was morally bankrupt and ... sapped by the economic and political maneuvers necessary to support the American ideal of 'getting ahead'". The characters in many of his poems are "types", and the effects of commerce and consumerism on the psyche are presented as if typical to everyone. The narrator is often superficially dispassionate, an ironic surveyor of the scene, but may reveal anger in the form of "sarcasm, contemptuous reductiveness, caricature, cartoony distortion, mocking hyperbole". In "Dirge" (Poems), a successful "executive type" eventually loses his status via setbacks—"nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the / bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called"—and dies by suicide. The poem ironically intersperses comic-book language in its otherwise emotionless recounting: "And wow he died as wow he lived, / going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and / biff