Fearing lacked money for much of his life (the period following his most successful novel was the exception). In New York, he received a monthly allowance from his mother until 1935, when she decided that her son should bear full responsibility for his new child. His mother had been skeptical of his choice of writing career.) He also relied on gifts from his father and loans from Latimer in those years. He held few full-time jobs for more than a few months, despite claiming, apparently falsely, to have worked as a salesman, a journalist, and even a lumberjack in press materials. In the 1950s, he worked for the "Books" section of Newsweek magazine (1952–1954), and, during his single longest period of employment, he developed press material and annual reports for the Muscular Dystrophy Association of America (1955–1958). Still, he lived in poverty in the 1950s, and had smoked and drank heavily for most of his life, which seriously affected his health in his last years. In early 1961, he felt a sharp pain in his back that worsened through June, when his son Bruce moved in to care for him. They went to Lenox Hill Hospital on June 21, and five days later Fearing died of a melanoma of his left chest and pleural cavity. He is buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois. Literary career In December 1924, Fearing moved to New York City, joining Latimer, where he pursued a writing career. His friend the poet Horace Gregory noted that his early writing was not particularly successful, but Fearing was particularly determined to make a living in writing. His early work was commercial, including stories for pulp magazines, and he often wrote under pseudonyms. He wrote sex-pulp novels at half a cent a word, which were published under the pseudonym Kirk Wolff. Meanwhile, he searched for editors who would publish his poetry. Fearing told a writers' convention in 1948 that "Literature is a means for crystallizing the myths under which society lives." His poetic influences included Walt Whitman, who he said was "the first writer to create a technique indigenous to the whole of this country's outlook", and François Villon, John Keats, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He enjoyed Maurice Ravel and the painter George Grosz. His early poems were published in magazines such as Poetry, Scribner's, The New Yorker, the New Masses, Free Verse, Voices, and The