He was one of the earliest modernist free-verse poets in Greenwich Village in 1913-1915 and associated with the artist's colony at Grantwood, New Jersey (sometimes referred to as Ridgefield), where Others: A Magazine of the New Verse was founded and published by Alfred Kreymborg in 1915.
He is part of a coterie of poets and authors sometimes called the "Others" group who were contributors to the magazine or residents at the colony and included: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Man Ray, Skipwith Cannell, Lola Ridge, Marcel Duchamp, and Fenton Johnson (poet) (the only African American published in the magazine).
The accident spurred George Sibley Johns as one of Joseph Pulitzer's "Fighting Editors" to start a newspaper campaign to have the trolleys install better brakes and put fenders on the cars.
His poem, "Second Avenue," won The Lyric Year[3] poetry contest, despite competing against Edna St. Vincent Millay's later famed "Renascence."
Earle sent a letter informing Millay of her win before consulting with the other judges, who had previously and separately agreed on criteria for a winner to winnow down the massive flood of entrants.
Johns received hate mail and made clear he felt her poem was the better one and avoided the awards banquet in his honor.
[1] In his Greenwich Village days, he was known as one of the Lyrical Left—more bohemian than doctrinaire—and did not fully commit to Left politics until he joined the Communist Party briefly in the early 1930s.
He resigned from the WPA project in 1937 and published Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself, a work that is part autobiography and part biography of his father, George Sibley Johns, who was editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and ran the paper after its owner Joseph Pulitzer went to New York to establish the New York World.
[1] In 1938, Johns moved to Connecticut with his fourth wife, Doria Berton, and continued to write articles and short stories.