In 1922, The New York Sun published a poem called “The History of Honey.” The Sun’s poetry editor at the time — our predecessor, Edmund Leamy (1890–1962) — received the poem in the mail and liked it well enough to publish it, sending the author a check for six dollars and encouraging her to send in more verses. 

And why not? The poet tells the story of purchasing an illustrated Chinese book. And in that imaginary book, she finds a myth about the creation of honey by the first bees, who stored it in the Mountains of the Moon — where it grew richer and more redolent, as though “Imprisoned in this honey, aging as the aeons wane, / Are the souls of all the flowers, waiting to be born again.” In rhymed couplets of seven-foot lines, the poem is metrically competent, whimsical, and exactly the kind of thing a harried poetry editor, needing weekly copy for the Sun’s pages, would be glad to receive.

What Leamy didn’t know was that the author, Nathalia Crane (1913–1998), was nine years old at the time. After taking a few more poems from her, he invited her to have lunch with him at the Sun’s offices the next time she came in to Manhattan from her home at Flatbush. As Crane would later tell the story, he was so flustered by discovering that the poet was a child that she never got the lunch she had been promised.

The best account of the turmoil that followed is “Nathalia from Brooklyn,” a 1926 essay written by the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson for H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine. In 1924, Crane, then eleven, collected her work in “The Janitor’s Boy: And Other Poems.” The title poem remains her most-republished work, and the volume showed how quickly she was taken up — with a foreword by William Rose Benét and an afterword by Edmund Leamy.

The volume brought her into the circle of poets and critics around the relentless New York poetry anthologist Louis Untermeyer. It also brought enough attention that a pair of reporters from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, perhaps angry that they had missed a story in their own bailiwick, decided that the girl’s writing must be a fraud, and they published piece after piece purporting to prove it. (Nunnally Johnson is not kind to their determined efforts to rip the mask of a young girl from the face of the actual author, who, they were sure, had to be an adult.)