Crane, Nathalia, 1913-1998

Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane was born on August 11, 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Clarence and Nelda Crane. She began writing at an early age and at nine years old the New York Sun published her first poem though the newspaper editors were unaware of her age. She became known as a child prodigy after the publication of her first book of poetry The Janitor's Boy, which she wrote at the age of ten. In September 1925, shortly after Nathalia’s twelfth birthday, her second book of poems Lava Lane was published. Crane was dubbed "The Brooklyn Bard" by the time she was thirteen and became part of the Louis Untermeyer poetry circle during her late teens, with Untermeyer contributing an introduction to her 1936 volume Swear by the Night & Other Poems. She was elected into the British Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers in 1925, though it was later discovered that this honor was accomplished by her father simply paying the dues to become a member.

Some of Crane’s other collections of poems include The Singing Crow (1926) and Venus Invisible (1928). In addition to poetry she wrote The Sunken Garden (1926), an account of the ill-fated 13th-century Children’s Crusade to the Holy Land, and an adult science fiction novel, An Alien from Heaven (1929). Crane attended the New Jersey College for Women (now Douglass Residential College, a part of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) and Barnard College. Her first husband was Vete George Black who passed away and she married her second husband Peter O'Reilly in 1973. Crane later became a professor of English at San Diego State University. She died on October 22, 1998, in San Diego, California at the age of 85.