Samuel Greenberg

Who was Samuel Greenberg?

Samuel Bernard Greenberg was an Austrian-American Jewish poet and artist. Greenberg grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City and spent the last years of his life in and out of charity hospitals. He died of tuberculosis in the Manhattan State Hospital on Wards Island. What little mainstream critical attention he has received has arisen through debate over the poet Hart Crane's re-writing of several Greenberg poems, most notably "Conduct", into "Emblems of Conduct" by Crane.