Girl Wonder: Nathalia Crane, Poetic Prodigy of the 1920s

Abstract

Largely forgotten today, from approximately the late 1910s through the 1930s, at least a dozen young girls brought out numerous books in the US. But there was one girl who was particularly talented and successful: Nathalia Crane, who published her first collection of poetry when she was just eleven years old in 1924. This article analyzes both her work and her reception from her first success through the subsequent controversy over her authorship instigated by a local Brooklyn newspaper. In the process, the article demonstrates the complicated connections between perceptions of girlhood and women's sexuality as they relate to political agency in the early twentieth-century United States.