Harold Norse

Harold Norse (July 6, 1916 – June 8, 2009) was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat Generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized.

Life Born Harold Rosen to an unmarried Lithuanian Jewish immigrant in Brooklyn. When his mother married, the family took the last name Albaum. Harold's stepfather was abusive. In the early 1950s, Harold came up with his new last name, Norse, by rearranging the letters in Rosen.

Norse received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1938, where he edited the literary magazine. He had planned to continue his education towards a PhD, but as his writing received recognition from others, he pursued a writing career instead.

Writing career Norse met Chester Kallman in 1938, and then became a part of W. H. Auden's "inner circle" when Auden moved to the U.S. in 1939. (Kallman and Auden later became lifelong partners.) However, Norse soon found himself allied with William Carlos Williams, who rated Norse the 'best poet of [his] generation.' For the rest of his career, Norse's style continued to rely on everyday American speech, and he frequently explored themes of travel, identity, and sexuality in his poetry. One reviewer described Norse as "beat before the Beats, hip before the hippies, and out of the closet long before gay liberation." He got his master's degree in literature from New York University in 1951. His first book of poems, The Undersea Mountain, was published in 1953.

Norse became frustrated with the style of poetry written in New York, which was dominated by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. in 1960 while living in Paris with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso from 1959 to 1963. The novel was not published until 1973, when it received a first print run in German, although it was eventually printed over 30 times in English.

Norse then traveled to Tangier, where he stayed with Jane and Paul Bowles. Norse was included in the Penguin Modern Poets series in 1969, and he asked that Charles Bukowski and Philip Lamantia be included in the work as well. His 1974 work, Hotel Nirvana, received critical praise and was nominated for a National Book Award, and 1977 is when he published his landmark work, Carnivorous Saint. Norse and Bukowski contributed straight-oriented erotica to Hustler during the late 1970s, and Norse later said this work was how he earned his living during that time. His first childhood crush on a boy was reciprocated, and they had an encounter on a hike, but Norse stopped it because he was worried about being bullied and labeled a "fairy". He had his first sexual encounter when he was 21. Harold Norse, James Baldwin, Anais Nin, William S. Burroughs, William Carlos Williams, Paul Carroll, Jack Hirschman, "Harold Norse Special Issue", Olé, No. 5 (Bensenville, IL: Open Skull Press, n.d., 1966?)