Writer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The illegitimate son of a woman barber, as a boy he was sent to an orphanage in Cleveland, OH, but ran away. After studying at the University of California and Columbia University, he joined the expatriate community in Paris in the 1920s. He wrote pioneering proletarian novels in the 1930s, including Bottom Dogs (1929) and From Flushing to Calvary (1932), then faded from notice, re-emerging in the 1960s as a prolific writer of verse and bitter social and literary criticism. In 1964 appeared his highly regarded autobiography, Because I Was Flesh. He taught at the University of Missouri, Kansas City (1964–77).