ABSTRACT
While he waited for The Dispossessed to appear, Berryman suffered tremendous anxiety about its reception. He knew that he ought to have begun work on his study of Stephen Crane, for which he had an outstanding contract, but he found himself more often consumed with self-doubt. His feelings swung between a self-approbation anticipating fame for his poetry and despair both of himself and of his work. He admitted to himself only a measure of his dire insecurity, but attempted to write ecstatic notices of his own book in the hope that friends would echo them, and planned to finish seven books by the end of 1950.
