page_title: Kenneth Fearing
section_title: Fiction
hierarchical_section_title: Kenneth Fearing / Literary career / Fiction
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration from The American Magazine printing of "The Judas Picture", by Kenneth Fearing, an abridged version of the story subsequently published as the novel The Big Clock
context_page_description: Kenneth Flexner Fearing was an American poet and novelist. A major poet of the Depression era, he addressed the shallowness and consumerism of American society as he saw it, often by ironically adapting the language of commerce and media. Critics have associated him with the American Left to varying degrees; his poetry belongs to the American proletarian poetry movement, but is rarely overtly political. Fearing published six original collections of poetry between 1929 and 1956. He wrote his best-known poems during the late 1920s and 1930s.
  He moved from Illinois to New York City in 1924, and spent the rest of his life there. He supported himself by writing pulp fiction, often under pseudonyms. Around 1939 be began to write novels and wrote less poetry. His seven novels are mystery and thriller stories with some unconventional characteristics. They often feature many characters who are given one or more chapters from their point of view, and in a few later novels he used fictional newspaper articles and radio transcripts to further the narrative. His most famous novel, The Big Clock, has remained in print since its 1946 publication and was adapted for film.
context_section_description: As the critical reception of his poetry declined into the 1940s—Halliday suggests that Fearing "seems to have felt increasingly jaded and skeptical about poetry's chance to participate in public life"—Fearing turned to novels. Between 1939 and 1960 he wrote seven mystery or "thriller" novels, although their formal qualities defy simple genre categorization. The most significant are The Hospital (1939), Dagger of the Mind (1941), Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and The Big Clock (1946).
  Fearing was well-known in 1939, and his first novel, The Hospital, quickly sold six thousand copies. A power outage at a hospital, caused by a drunk janitor, is the central event around which numerous characters' lives are portrayed. Each chapter is devoted to one character's point of view, a style common to all of Fearing's novels. The novel was criticized for the large number of characters and their lack of depth, a complaint that continued throughout Fearing's fiction career. Critics, however, praised its crisp prose style—one called it a "staccato prose poem"—and its portrayal of lower-class characters like the janitor. Dagger of the Mind (1941) is a psychological thriller in which there is a murder at an art colony. The creation of suspense from states of mind (via interior monologue) rather than physical violence was a departure from most novels of its type. Clark Gifford's Body (1942) recounts a revolution in an unnamed country that begins with the title character's attack on a radio station. It has more than twenty characters, moves back and forth in time, and inserts contradictory radio and newspaper accounts of events. The novel's experimental aspects and pessimism were not met well by readers.
  He worked for 14 months on his most well-known novel, The Big Clock (1946), whose protagonist, an editor for a crime magazine, is put in charge of a murder investigation by his boss—but both men had had a relationship with the murdered woman. The novel was more successful than his prior efforts artistically and commercially, with an engaging plot and more character depth. Alan M. Wald, an historian of the American Left, calls it "a psychosexual roman noir stressing the sinister effect of market segmentation in the publishing industry". It was critically well-received, and was popular enough that a Bantam paperback and an Armed Services Edition soon followed. It remains in print. The novel was developed into a film of the same name in 1948, and again in 1987  (No Way Out). The novel earned Fearing $60,000 from republication and film rights. His financial success was short-lived, as income from the novel dried up due to the unfavorable contracts that he had negotiated himself.
  Wald summarizes the "frightening and fragmented hollowness" that Fearing saw in post-war US society and depicted in The Big Clock:
  The menacing ambience of dislocation that permeates The Big Clock is structurally and symbolically rendered as industrial capitalism, a socioeconomic order in which the avenues of communication, especially publishing and the airwaves, are evolving into a science of planned manipulation designed to ensure profitability. Well-paid deceivers, together with the naively deceived, are imprisoned as cogs in the apparatus of private enterprise's modern institutions. ... The genius of The Big Clock is its previsioning of the manifold mythological dimensions of a "Consumer's Republic" that would typify the era.
  In Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), an audio recording and storage device named "Mikki" is at the center of a mystery. Ellen Vaughn, the daughter of its inventor, uses the machine's "463,635 hours of recorded speeches, music, and business transactions" to determine the circumstances of her father's death. She finds a recording in which her father and his brother argue about the best way to exploit "Mikki", which Ellen ultimately destroys with a gun. The story is unusual in that the mystery is resolved with retrieved information rather than "detection".
  The Crozart Story (1960) is about the heads of two rival public relations firms.Fearing has 
caption: The Big Clock first appeared in an abridged form in The American Magazine as  "The Judas Picture" (October 1946)
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