Maxwell Bodenheim (1892–1954)

Relatively obscure today, he was widely known internationally during the Jazz Age of the 1920s for his erotic poetry and prose and scandalous womanizing. A poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. But by the 1940s he was a homeless wino who wrote hasty poems and sold them for drinks. He was shot dead in 1954 by a mentally disturbed man involved in a sordid tryst with Bodenheim’s wife, whom he also killed.