Hart Crane began work on The Bridge, his most ambitious work, in the early 1920s. Obsessed by what he called America's postwar vertigo, he envisioned the work as an epic "synthesis of America and its structural identity." The Bridge was first published by Harry and Caresse Crosby at their Black Sun Press in Paris in 1930. This working typescript for their edition contains notes and corrections in the hands of the Crosbys, as well as that of the author. Among its nearly two thousand items, the Hart Crane Collection contains two complete typescript versions of the poem and the extant drafts of the individual pieces which make up the larger work, as well as the letters of agreement with Horace Liveright for the American publication of both White Buildings and The Bridge.