Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. Today, he is recognized as being one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

The eighth surviving child of highly devout parents—his father was a Methodist minister and his mother a leading member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union—Crane was raised in several New Jersey towns and Port Jervis, New York. He began writing at an early age and had published several articles by the age of 16. Having little interest in university studies, he left school in 1891 and began work as a reporter and writer. Crane's first novel was the 1893 Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which critics generally consider the first work of American literary Naturalism. He won international acclaim for his 1895 Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without any battle experience. The novel is now considered an American classic.

In 1896, Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after acting as a witness for a suspected prostitute. Late that year he accepted an offer to cover the Spanish-American War as a war correspondent. As he waited in Jacksonville, Florida for passage to Cuba, he met Cora Taylor, the madam of a brothel and his future common-law wife. While en route to Cuba, Crane's ship sank off the coast of Florida, leaving him marooned for several days in a small dinghy. His ordeal was later described in his well-known short story, "The Open Boat". He subsequently covered conflicts in Greece and Cuba, about which he wrote numerous dispatches and stories. During the final year of his life he lived in England with Cora. Plagued by financial difficulties and ill health, Crane died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium at the age of 28.

At the time of his death, Crane had become an omnipotent figure in American literature. He was nearly forgotten, however, until two decades later when critics revived interest in his life and work. Stylistically, Crane's writing is characterized by descriptive vividness and intensity along with the use of dialect and irony. Common themes involve fear, spiritual crisis and social isolation. Although recognized primarily for The Red Badge of Courage, Crane is also known for his unconventional poetry and heralded for short stories such as "The Open Boat", "The Blue Hotel", "The Monster" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky". His writing has made a lasting impression on contemporary writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists.

Biography

Early years

Stephen Crane was born November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, to Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, a Methodist minister, and Mary Helen Peck Crane, a clergyman's daughter. His birthplace at 14 Mulberry Place was torn down in the 1930s to become the site of a playground. He was the fourteenth and last child born to the couple; the forty-five year old Mary Crane had lost her four previous children, who each died within one year of birth. Nicknamed "Stevie" by the family, he joined eight surviving brothers and sisters—Mary Helen, George Peck, Jonathan Townley, William Howe, Agnes Elizabeth, Edmund Byran, Wilbur Fiske, and Luther. Family legend maintains that Crane was descended from and named for a founder of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, who had come from England or Wales as early as 1665, and a Revolutionary War patriot who served two terms as a delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Crane would later write that his father, Dr. Crane, "was a great, fine, simple mind" who had written "numerous" tracts on theology. His mother was an eloquent spokeswoman for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, but although she was a highly religious woman, Crane did not believe that "she was as narrow as most of her friends or family. The young Stephen was raised primarily by his sister Agnes, who was 15 years his senior. In 1876, the family moved to Port Jervis, New York, where Dr. Crane became the pastor of Drew Methodist Church, a position that he retained until his death.

As a child, Stephen was often sickly and afflicted by constant colds. His father wrote in his diary when the young boy was not yet two that his youngest son became "so sick that we are anxious about him." Despite his fragile nature, Crane was a precocious child who taught himself to read before the age of four. His first known inquiry, recorded by his father, dealt with writing; at the age of three, while imitating his brother Townley's writing, he asked his mother, "how do you spell O? In December 1879, Crane wrote a poem about wanting a dog for Christmas. Entitled "I'd Rather Have –", it is his first surviving poem. Stephen was not regularly enrolled in school until January 1880, but he had no difficulty in completing two grades in six weeks. Recalling this feat, he wrote that it "sounds like the lie of a fond mother at a teaparty, but I do remember that I got ahead very fast and that father was very pleased with me.

Dr. Crane died on February 16, 1880, at the age of 60. He was mourned at his funeral by some 1,400 people, more than double the size of his congregation. After her husband's death, Mrs. Crane moved her family to Roseville, near Newark. After living with his brother William in Port Jervis for a few years, Stephen and his sister Helen then moved to Asbury Park to be with their brother Townley and his wife. Townley was a professional journalist; he headed the Long Branch department of both the New York Tribune and the Associated Press and also served as editor of the Asbury Park Shore Press. Agnes took a position at Asbury Park's intermediate school and moved in with Helen to care for the young Stephen. Within a couple of years, several more losses struck the Crane family. First, Townley's wife, Fannie, died of Bright's disease in 1883 after the deaths of the couple's two young children. Agnes then became ill and died on June 10, 1884, of cerebrospinal meningitis at the age of 28.

Schooling

Crane wrote his first known story, "Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle", when he was 14. In the fall of 1885 he enrolled at Pennington Seminary, a ministry-focused coeducational boarding school north of Trenton, where his father had been principal from 1849 to 1858. Soon after her youngest son left for school, Mrs. Crane began suffering what the Asbury Park Shore Press reported as "a temporary aberration of the mind. Although she apparently recovered, the fourth death in Stephen's immediate family in six years came when the twenty-three year old Luther died after falling in front of an oncoming train while working as a flagman for the Erie Railroad.

After two years, Crane left Pennington for Claverack College, a quasi-military school. He would later look back on his time at Claverack as "the happiest period of my life although I was not aware of it. A classmate remembered him as a highly literate but erratic student, lucky to pass examinations in math and science, and yet "far in advance of his fellow students in his knowledge of History and Literature", his favorite subjects. Not having a middle name like the other students, he took to signing his name "Stephen T. Crane" in order "to win recognition as a regular fellow". Crane was seen as friendly, but also moody and rebellious. He sometimes skipped class in order to play baseball, a game in which he starred as catcher, although he was also greatly interested in the school's military training program. He rose rapidly in the ranks of the student battalion. One classmate described him as "indeed physically attractive without being handsome," but he was aloof, reserved and not generally popular at Claverack.

In the summer of 1888, Crane became his brother Townley's assistant and reported on the New Jersey shore. Crane's first signed publication was an article on the explorer Henry M. Stanley's famous quest to find the English missionary David Livingstone in Africa. It appeared in the February 1890 Claverack College Vidette. Within a few months, however, Crane was persuaded by his family to forgo a military career and transfer to Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in order to pursue a mining engineering degree. He registered at Lafayette on September 12 and promptly became involved in extracurricular activities; he took up baseball once more and joined the largest fraternity, Delta Upsilon, and two rival groups: the Washington Literary Society and the Franklin Literary Society. Crane infrequently attended classes and ended the semester with grades for four of the seven courses he had taken. After only one semester, Crane transferred to Syracuse University where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate in the College of Liberal Arts. He roomed in the Delta Upsilon fraternity house and joined the baseball team. Attending merely one class (English Literature) during the middle trimester, he remained in residence while taking no courses in the third trimester.

Putting more emphasis on his writing, Crane began to experiment with tone and style while trying out different subjects. A fictional story of his called "Great Bugs of Onondaga" ran simultaneously in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the New York Tribune. Claiming that "college is a waste of time", Crane decided to become a newspaper reporter. Shortly after attending a Delta Upsilon chapter meeting on June 12, 1891, Crane left college for good.

Post-education and full-time writer

From the beginning of his writing career, Crane's "chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That to my mind is good writing. Soon after leaving school, Crane showed two of his stories to editor and author Willis Fletcher Johnson, who accepted them for publication in the Tribune's Sunday supplement. In February 1892, "Hunting Wild Dogs" and "The Last of the Mohicans", the first in a series of unsigned Sullivan County sketches and tales, appeared in print. One of the most important events in Crane's life involved meeting Hamlin Garland in 1891. Garland was lecturing on American literature and the expressive arts, and on August 17 he gave a talk on novelist William Dean Howells, which Crane wrote up for the Tribune.

In the fall of 1891, Stephen moved into his brother Edmund's house in Lake View, a suburb of Paterson, New Jersey. He began working as a full-time writer, making trips to New York and wandering into tenements. He also began exploring the Bowery, a small neighborhood in the southern portion of Manhattan that had once been a prosperous area. After the Civil War, however, its shops and mansions had given way to saloons, dance halls, brothels and flophouses, all of which Crane frequented for research purposes. He was attracted to the human nature witnessed in the slums, which he believed to be "open and plain, with nothing hidden". Believing that no writer had written anything sincere about the Bowery, Crane became determined to do so himself.

The end of that year was filled not only with inspiration, but also with tragedy; shortly before she fell ill for the last time, Crane's mother wrote to him to be good and "always independent, always honest". She died at the age of 64 on December 7 and the 20-year-old Crane appointed Edmund as his guardian. Despite being "frail", "undernourished" and suffering from "a hacking cough", which did not prevent him from smoking cigarettes, Crane began a brief romance with a married woman named Lily Brandon Munroe. Although Munroe would later say in an interview that Crane "was not a handsome man", she nonetheless admired his "remarkable almond-shaped gray eyes. He begged her to elope with him, but her family opposed the match because Crane lacked money and prospects, and she declined.

Life in New York

In October 1892, Crane moved into a rooming house in Manhattan inhabited by a group of medical students. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, about a girl who "blossoms in a mud-puddle" and becomes a victim of circumstance, was written during this time. In the winter of 1893, Crane took the manuscript of Maggie to Richard Watson Gilder, who rejected it for publication in The Century Magazine. Crane decided to publish it privately; it was eventually published in late February or early March 1893 by a small printing shop that usually printed medical books and religious tracts. The typewritten title page read simply: "A Girl of the Streets, / A Story of New York. / —By—/Stephen Crane." The name "Maggie" was added to the title later. Crane used the pseudonym "Johnston Smith" for this initial publication, later telling friend and artist Corwin Knapp Linson that the nom de plume was the "commonest name I could think of. I had an editor friend named Johnson, and put in the "t", and no one could find me in the mob of Smiths. The earliest known review of Crane's work, which appeared on March 13, 1894, in the Port Jervis Union, stated that "the pathos of [Maggie's] sad story will be deeply felt by all susceptible persons who read the book. Despite this early praise, Crane became depressed and destitute from having spent $869 for 1,100 copies of a novel that did not sell; he ended up giving a hundred copies away. He would later remember "how I looked forward to publication and pictured the sensation I thought it would make. It fell flat. Nobody seemed to notice it or care for it... Poor Maggie! She was one of my first loves.

In March 1893, Crane spent hours lounging in Linson's studio while having his portrait painted. He became fascinated with issues of the Century that were largely devoted to famous battles and military leaders from the Civil War. Frustrated with the dryly written stories, Crane stated, "I wonder that some of those fellows don't tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they're as emotionless as rocks. Crane returned to these magazines during subsequent visits to Linson's studio, and eventually the idea of writing a war novel overtook him. He would later state that he "had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood" and had imagined "war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers. This novel would ultimately become The Red Badge of Courage.

"A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills."

— Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

From the beginning, Crane wished to show what it felt like to be in a war by writing "a psychological portrayal of fear." Conceiving his story from the point of view of a young private who is at first filled with boyish dreams of the glory of war and then quickly becomes disillusioned by war's reality, Crane borrowed the private's surname, "Fleming", from his sister-in-law's maiden name. He would later relate that the first paragraphs came to him with "every word in place, every comma, every period fixed." Working mostly nights, he wrote from around midnight until four or five in the morning. Because he could not afford a typewriter, he wrote carefully in ink on legal-sized paper, seldom crossing through or interlining a word. If he did change something, he would rewrite the whole page.

While working on his second novel, Crane remained prolific, concentrating on publishing stories to stave off poverty; "An Experiment in Misery", based on Crane's experiences in the Bowery, was printed by the New York Press. He also wrote five or six poems a day. In early 1894, he showed some of his poems, or "lines" as he called them, to Hamlin Garland, who said he read "some thirty in all" with "growing wonder. Although Garland and William Dean Howells encouraged him to submit his poetry for publication, Crane's free verse was too unconventional for most. After brief wrangling between poet and publisher, Copeland & Day accepted Crane's first book of poems, The Black Riders and Other Lines. He received a 10 percent royalty, and the publisher assured him that the book would be in a form "more severely classic than any book ever yet issued in America.

In the spring of 1894, Crane offered the finished manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage to McClure's Magazine, which had become the foremost magazine for Civil War literature. While McClure's delayed giving him an answer on his novel, they offered him an assignment writing about the Pennsylvania coal mines. "In the Depths of a Coal Mine", a story with pictures by Linson, was syndicated by McClure's in a number of newspapers, heavily edited. Crane was reportedly disgusted by the cuts, asking Linson: "Why the hell did they send me up there then? Do they want the public to think the coal mines gilded ball-rooms with the miners eating ice-cream in boiled shirt-fronts?

After discovering that McClure's could not afford to pay him, Crane took his war novel to Irving Bacheller of the Bacheller-Johnson Newspaper Syndicate, which agreed to publish The Red Badge of Courage in serial form. Between the third and the ninth of December 1894, The Red Badge of Courage began appearing in some half-dozen newspapers in the United States. Although it was greatly cut for syndication, Bacheller attested to its causing a stir, saying "its quality [was] immediately felt and recognized. The lead editorial in the Philadelphia Press of December 7 said that Crane "is a new name now and unknown, but everybody will be talking about him if he goes on as he has begun".

Travels and fame

At the end of January 1895, Crane left on what he called "a very long and circuitous newspaper trip" to the west. While writing feature articles for the Bacheller syndicate, he traveled to Saint Louis, Missouri, Nebraska, New Orleans, Galveston, Texas and then Mexico City. Irving Bacheller would later state that he "sent Crane to Mexico for new color", which the author found in the form of Mexican slum life. Whereas he found the lower class in New York pitiful, he was impressed by the "superiority" of the Mexican peasants' contentment and "even refuse[d] to pity them. Returning to New York five months later, Crane joined the Lantern (alternately spelled "Lanthom" or "Lanthorne") Club organized by a group of young writers and journalists. The Club, located on the roof of an old house on William Street near the Brooklyn Bridge, served as a drinking establishment of sorts and was made to look like a ship's cabin. There Crane ate one good meal a day, although friends worried about his "constant smoking, too much coffee, lack of food and poor teeth," as Nelson Greene put it. Living in near-poverty and greatly anticipating the publication of his books, Crane began work on two more novels: The Third Violet and George's Mother.

The Black Riders was published by Copeland & Day shortly before his return to New York in May, but it received mostly criticism if not abuse for the poems' unconventional style and use of free verse. A piece in the Bookman called Crane "the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry and a commentator from the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean stated that "there is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page. Whitman's Leaves of Grass were luminous in comparison. Poetic lunacy would be a better name for the book. In June, the New York Tribune dismissed the book as "so much trash. Crane, however, was pleased that the book was "making some stir".

In sharp contrast to the reception for Crane's poetry, The Red Badge of Courage was welcomed with great acclaim after its publication by Appleton in September 1895. For the next four months the book was in the top six on various bestseller lists around the country. It arrived on the literary scene "like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky," according to H. L. Mencken, who was about 15 at the time. The novel also became popular in England; Joseph Conrad, a future friend of Crane, wrote that the novel "detonated... with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive." Appleton published two, possibly three, printings in 1895 and as many as eleven more in 1896. Although some critics considered the work overly graphic and profane, it was widely heralded for its realistic portrayal of war and unique writing style. The Detroit Free Press declared that "The Red Badge" would give readers "so vivid a picture of the emotions and the horrors of the battlefield that you will pray your eyes may never look upon the reality.

Wanting to capitalize on the success of "The Red Badge", McClure Syndicate offered Crane a contract to write a series on Civil War battlefields. Because it was a wish of his to "visit the battlefield—which I was to describe—at the time of year when it was fought," Crane agreed to take the assignment. Visiting battlefields in Northern Virginia, including Fredericksburg, he would later produce five more Civil War tales: "Three Miraculous Soldiers", "The Veteran", "An Indiana Campaign", "An Episode of War", and "The Little Regiment".

Scandal

At the age of 24, Crane, who was reveling in his success, became involved in a highly publicized case involving a suspected prostitute named Dora Clark. In the early morning hours of September 16, he escorted two chorus girls and Clark from New York City's Broadway Garden, a popular resort where he had interviewed the women for a series he was writing. As Crane saw one woman safely to a streetcar, a plainclothes policeman named Charles Becker arrested the other two for solicitation; Crane was threatened with arrest while attempting to interfere. One of the women was released after Crane confirmed her erroneous claim that she was his wife, but Clark was charged and taken to the precinct. Against advice of the arresting sergeant, Crane made a statement confirming Dora Clark's innocence, stating that "I only know that while with me she acted respectably, and that the policeman's charge was false. On the basis of Crane's testimony, Clark was discharged. The media seized upon the story; news spread to Philadelphia, Boston and beyond, with papers focusing on Crane's bravery and courage. The Stephen Crane story, as it became known, soon became a source for ridicule, however; the Chicago Dispatch in particular quipped that "Stephen Crane is respectfully informed that association with women in scarlet is not necessarily a 'Red Badge of Courage' ".

A couple weeks after her trial, Clark pressed charges of false arrest against the officer who had arrested her. The next day, the officer physically attacked Clark in the presence of witnesses for having brought charges against him. Crane, who initially went briefly to Philadelphia to escape the pressure of publicity, returned to New York to give testimony at Becker's trial despite advice given to him from Theodore Roosevelt, who was Police Commissioner at the time and a new acquaintance of Crane. Crane became a target for the defense in that the police raided his apartment and interviewed people who knew him, attempting to find incriminating evidence in order to lessen his testimony. A vigorous cross-examination took place that sought to portray Crane as a man of dubious morals; while the prosecution proved that he frequented brothels, Crane claimed this was merely for research purposes. After the trial ended on October 16, the arresting officer was exonerated, but Crane's reputation was ruined.

Cora Taylor and the Commodore shipwreck

Given $700 in Spanish gold by the Bacheller-Johnson syndicate to work as a war correspondent in Cuba, Crane left New York on November 27 on a train bound for Jacksonville, Florida. Upon arrival in Jacksonville, he registered at the St. James Hotel under the alias of Samuel Carleton to maintain anonymity while seeking passage to Cuba. While waiting for a boat, he toured the city and visited the local brothels. Within days he met 31-year-old Cora Taylor, proprietor of the downtown bawdy house Hotel de Dream. Born into a respectable Boston family, Taylor (whose legal name was Cora Ethel Stewart) had already had two brief marriages; her first husband, Vinton Murphy, divorced her on grounds of adultery. In 1889, she had married Captain Donald William Stewart, whom she left in 1892 for another man. By the time Crane arrived, Taylor had been in Jacksonville for two years. She lived a bohemian lifestyle but was also a well-known and respected local figure. The two spent much time together while Crane awaited his departure. He was finally cleared to leave for the Cuban port of Cienfuegas on New Year's Eve aboard the SS Commodore.

"None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea."

— Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat

The ship sailed from Jacksonville with 27 or 28 men and a cargo of supplies and ammunition for the Cuban rebels. On the St. John's River and less than from Jacksonville, Commodore struck a sandbar in a dense fog and damaged its hull. Although towed off the sandbar the following day, it was again beached in Mayport and again damaged. A leak began in the boiler room that evening and as a result of malfunctioning water pumps, the ship came to a standstill about from Mosquito Inlet. As the ship took on more water, Crane described the engine room as resembling "a scene at this time taken from the middle kitchen of hades. Commodore's lifeboats were lowered in the early hours of the morning on January 2 and the ship ultimately sank at 7 a.m. Crane was one of the last to leave the ship in a dinghy. In an ordeal that he would recount in the novella "The Open Boat", Crane and three other men (including the ship's Captain) foundered off the coast of Florida for a day and a half before attempting to land the dinghy at Daytona Beach. The small boat, however, overturned in the surf, forcing the exhausted men to swim to shore; one of them died. Having lost the gold given to him for his journey, Crane wired Cora Taylor for help. She traveled to Daytona and returned to Jacksonville with Crane the next day, only four days after he had left on Commodore.

The disaster was widely reported on the front pages of newspapers across the country. Rumors that the ship had been sabotaged were widely circulated but never substantiated. Portrayed favorably and heroically by the press, Crane emerged from the ordeal with his reputation enhanced, if not restored, after the battering he received during the Dora Clark affair. Meanwhile, Crane's affair with Taylor quickly blossomed.

Greco-Turkish War

Despite contentment in Jacksonville and the need for rest after his ordeal, Crane became restless. He left Jacksonville on January 11 for New York City, where he applied for a passport to Cuba, Mexico and the West Indies. Spending three weeks in New York, he completed "The Open Boat" and periodically visited Port Jervis. By this time, however, blockades had formed along the Florida coast, and Crane concluded that he would never be able to travel to Cuba. "The Open Boat" was sold to Scribner's for $300 in early March. Determined to work as a war correspondent, Crane signed on with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal to cover the impending Greco-Turkish conflict. He brought along Taylor, who had sold the Hotel de Dream in order to follow him.

On March 20, they sailed first to England, where Crane was warmly received. They arrived in Athens in early April; between April 17 (when Turkey declared war on Greece) and April 22, Crane wrote his first published report of the war, "An Impression of the 'Concert' ". When he left for Epirus in the northwest, Taylor remained in Athens, where she became the Greek war's first woman war correspondent. She wrote under the pseudonym "Imogene Carter" for the New York Journal, a job that Crane had secured for her. They wrote frequently, traveling throughout the country separately or together. The first large battle that Crane witnessed was the Turks' assault on General Constantine Smolenski's Greek forces at Velestino. Crane wrote, "It is a great thing to survey the army of the enemy. Just where and how it takes hold upon the heart is difficult of description. During this battle, Crane encountered "a fat waddling puppy" that he immediately claimed, dubbing it "Velestino, the Journal dog". An armistice was signed between Greece and Turkey on May 20, ending the 30-day war; Crane and Cora left Greece for England, taking two Greek brothers as servants and Velestino the dog with them.

England and Spanish-American War

After staying in Limpsfield, Surrey, for a few days, Crane and Taylor settled in Ravensbrook, a plain brick villa in Oxted. Referring to themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Crane, the couple lived openly in England. Crane, however, chose to conceal the relationship from his friends and family. While admired in England, Crane thought himself attacked back home: "There seem so many of them in America who want to kill, bury and forget me purely out of unkindness and envy and—my unworthiness, if you choose," he wrote. Velestino the dog sickened and died soon after their arrival in England, on August 1. Crane, who had a great love for dogs, wrote an emotional letter to a friend an hour after the dog's death, stating that "for eleven days we fought death for him, thinking nothing of anything but his life." The Limpsfield-Oxted area was home to members of the socialist Fabian Society and therefore a magnet for writers like Edmund Gosse, Ford Maddox Ford and Edward Garnett. Crane also met the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad in October 1897, with whom he would have what Crane called a "warm and endless friendship".

Although Crane was confident among peers, strong negative reviews of the recently-published The Third Violet was causing his literary reputation to dwindle. Reviewers were also highly critical of Crane's war letters, deeming them self-centered. Although The Red Badge of Courage had by this time gone through fourteen printings in the United States and six in England, Crane was running out of money. To survive financially, he worked at a feverish pitch, writing prolifically for both the English and the American markets. He wrote in quick succession stories such as "The Monster", "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky", "Death and the Child" and "The Blue Hotel". Crane began to attach price tags to his new works of fiction, hoping that "The Bride", for example, would fetch $175. As 1897 ended, however, Crane's money crisis worsened. Amy Leslie, a reporter from Chicago and a former lover of his, sued him for $550. The New York Times reported that Leslie gave him $800 in November 1896 but that he had only repaid her a quarter of the sum. In February, he was summoned to answer Leslie's claim. The claim, however, was apparently settled out of court, because no record of adjudication exists. Meanwhile, Crane felt "heavy with troubles" and "chased to the wall" by expenses. He confided to his agent that he was $2,000 in debt but that he would "beat it" with more literary output.

Soon after the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, under suspicious circumstances, Crane tried to join the Navy but was found physically unfit. Crane's health was failing, and it is believed that signs of his pulmonary tuberculosis, which he may have contracted in childhood, became apparent. He was then offered a £60 advance by Blackwood's Magazine for articles "from the seat of war in the event of a war breaking out" between the United States and Spain. With almost no money coming in from his finished stories, Stephen accepted the assignment and left Oxted for New York. Cora and the rest of the household stayed behind to fend off local creditors. Crane applied for a passport and left New York for Key West two days before Congress declared war. While the war idled, however, he interviewed people and produced occasional copy. In early June, he observed establishment of an American base in Cuba when Marines seized Guantanamo Bay. He then went ashore with the Marines, planning "to gather impressions and write them as the spirit moved. Although he would write honestly about his fear in battle, others observed his calmness and composure. He would later recall "this prolonged tragedy of the night" in the war tale "Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo". After showing a willingness to serve during fighting at Cuzco, Cuba, by carrying messages to company commanders, Crane was officially cited for his "material aid during the action".

He continued to report upon various battles and the worsening military conditions and praised Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders despite past tensions with the Commissioner. In early July, however, Crane was sent to the United States for medical treatment for a high fever. He was diagnosed with yellow fever, then malaria. Upon arrival in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, he spent a few weeks resting in a hotel. Although Crane had filed more than twenty dispatches in the three months he had covered the war, the World's business manager believed that the paper had not received its money's worth and fired him. In retaliation, Crane signed with Hearst's New York Journal with the wish to return to Cuba. He traveled first to Puerto Rico and then to Havana. In September, rumors began to spread that Crane, who was working anonymously, had either been killed or had simply disappeared. He nonetheless sporadically sent out dispatches and stories; he wrote about the mood in Havana, the crowded city sidewalks, and other various topics, but he was soon desperate for money again. Cora, left alone in England, was also penniless. She became frantic with worry over her lover's whereabouts; they were not in direct communication until the end of the year. Crane finally left Havana and arrived in England on January 11, 1899.

Death

Rent on Ravensbrook had not been paid for a year. Upon returning to England, Crane secured a solicitor to act as guarantor for their debts, after which Stephen and Cora relocated to Brede Place. This manor in Sussex, which dated to the 14th century and had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing, was offered to them by friends at a modest rent. The relocation appeared to give hope to Crane, but his money problems continued. Deciding that he could no longer afford to write for American publications, he concentrated on publishing in English magazines.

Crane pushed himself to write feverishly during the first months at Brede; he told his publisher that he was "doing more work now than I have at any other period in my life". His health worsened, and by the fall of 1899 he was asking friends about health resorts. The Monster and Other Stories was in production and War Is Kind, his second collection of poems, was published in the United States in May. None of his books after The Red Badge of Courage had sold well, however, and he bought a typewriter in order to spur output. Active Service, a novella based on Crane's correspondence experience, was published in October to mixed reviews. The New York Times reviewer in particular questioned "whether the author of 'Active Service' himself really sees anything remarkable in his newspapery hero.

In December, the Cranes held an elaborate Christmas party at Brede, attended by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells and other friends, that spanned several days. On December 29, Crane suffered a severe hemorrhage of the lungs. In January 1900 he had recovered sufficiently to work on a new novel, The O'Ruddy, completing 25 of the 33 chapters. Although plans were made for him to travel as a correspondent to Gibraltar to write sketches from Saint Helena, the site of a Boer prison, at the end of March and in early April he suffered two more massive hemorrhages. Cora took over most of Crane's correspondence while he was ill, writing to friends for monetary aid. The couple planned to travel on the continent, but Conrad, upon visiting Crane for the last time, remarked that his friend's "wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes.

On May 28, Stephen and Cora arrived at Badenweiler, Germany, a health spa near the Black Forest. Despite his weakened condition, Crane continued to dictate fragmentary episodes for the completion of The O'Ruddy. He died on June 5, 1900, at the age of 28. In his will he left everything to Cora, who took his body to New York for burial. Crane was interred in the Evergreen Cemetery in what is now Hillside, New Jersey.

Fiction and poetry

Style and technique

Stephen Crane's fiction is typically categorized as representative of Naturalism, Realism, Impressionism or a mixture of the three. Critic Sergio Perosa, for example, wrote in his essay "Stephen Crane fra naturalismo e impressionismo" that the work presents a "symbiosis" of Naturalistic ideals and Impressionistic methods. Similarities between the stylistic techniques in Crane's writing and Impressionist painting—including the use of color and chiaroscuro—are often cited to support the theory that Crane was not only an Impressionist but also influenced by the movement itself. H. G. Wells remarked upon "the great influence of the studio" on Crane's work, quoting a passage from The Red Badge of Courage as an example: "At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.... From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects. Although no direct evidence exists that Crane formulated a precise theory of his craft, he vehemently rejected sentimentality, asserting that "a story should be logical in its action and faithful to character. Truth to life itself was the only test, the greatest artists were the simplest, and simple because they were true.

Poet and biographer John Berryman suggested that there were three basic variations, or "norms", of Crane's narrative style. The first, being "flexible, swift, abrupt and nervous", is best exemplified in The Red Badge of Courage, while the second ("supple majesty") is believed to relate to "The Open Boat", and the third ("much more closed, circumstantial and 'normal' in feeling and syntax') to later stories such as "The Monster". Crane's work, however, cannot be determined by style solely on chronology. Not only does his fiction not take place in any particular region with similar characters, but it varies from serious in tone to reportorial writing and light fiction. Crane's writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is consistently driven by immediacy and is at once concentrated, vivid and intense. The novels and short stories contain poetic characteristics such as shorthand prose, suggestibility, shifts in perspective and ellipses between and within sentences. Similarly, omission plays a large part in Crane's work; the names of his protagonists are not commonly used and sometimes they are not named at all.

Crane was often criticized by early reviewers for his frequent incorporation of everyday speech into dialogue, mimicking the regional accents of his characters with colloquial stylization. This is apparent in his first novel, in which Crane ignored the romantic, sentimental approach of slum fiction; he instead concentrated on the cruelness and sordidness of poverty, using the brashness of the Bowery's crude dialect and profanity, which is used lavishly. The distinct dialect that his Bowery characters use is apparent when the title character admonishes her brother at the beginning of the text, saying: "Yeh knows it puts mudder out when yes comes home half dead, an' it's like we'll all get a poundin'.

Major themes

Crane's work is often thematically driven by Naturalistic and Realistic concerns. These themes, which are particularly evident in Crane's first three novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets The Red Badge of Courage and George's Mother, include ideals versus realities, spiritual crises and fear, which involves courage, cowardice and conflict of war. The three main characters search for a way to make their dreams come true, but ultimately suffer from crises of identity. Regarding the theme of fear and the dichotomy of courage and cowardice, this is clearly represented in The Red Badge of Courage in which the main character, Henry Fleming, longs for the heroics of battle but ultimately fears it. There is therefore the threat of death, misery and the loss of self.

Extreme isolation from society and community is also a heavily utilized theme in Crane's work. During the most intense battle scenes in The Red Badge of Courage, for example, the story's focus is predominately "on the inner responses of a self unaware of others". In "The Open Boat", "An Experiment in Misery" and other short stories, Crane uses experiments with light, motion and color to express different degrees of epistemological uncertainty. Similar to other Naturalistic works, Crane scrutinizes the position of man, who has been isolated not only from society, but from God and nature. "The Open Boat", for example, distances itself from the old Romantic optimism and affirmation of man's place in the world by concentrating on the characters' isolation.

Novels

Beginning with the publication of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893, Crane was recognized by critics mainly as a novelist. Maggie was initially rejected by numerous publishers because of its atypical and true-to-life depictions of class warfare, which clashed with the common, sentimental tales of that time. Rather than focusing on those that make up the very rich or middle class, the novel's characters are lower-class denizens of New York's Bowery. The chief character, Maggie, descends into prostitution after being led astray by her lover. Although the novel's plot is simple, its dramatic mood, quick pace and portrayal of Bowery life have made it memorable. Maggie is not merely an account of slum life as it is also meant as a representation of eternal symbols. In his first draft, Crane did not give his characters proper names. Instead, they were identified as epithets: Maggie, for example, was the girl who "blossomed in a mud-puddle" and Pete, her seducer, was a "knight". The novel is dominated by bitter irony and anger as well as destructive morality and treacherous sentiment. Critics would later call the novel "the first dark flower of American Naturalism" for its distinctive elements of naturalistic fiction.

Written thirty years after the end of the Civil War and before Crane had any experience of battle, The Red Badge of Courage was innovative stylistically as well as psychologically. Often described as a war novel, it focuses less on battle and more on the main character's psyche and his reactions and responses in a wartime situation. Told in a third-person limited point of view, it reflects the private experience of Henry Fleming, a young soldier who flees from combat, rather than upon the external world. The Red Badge of Courage is notable in its vivid descriptions and well cadenced prose, both of which help create suspense within the story. Like Crane's first novel, The Red Badge of Courage has a heavily ironic tone which increases in its severity as the novel progresses. The title of the work itself is ironic; Henry wishes "that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage", echoing a wish to have been wounded in battle. The wound he does receive (from the rifle butt of a fleeing Union soldier), however, is not a badge of courage but a badge of shame.

There is a strong connection in the novel between humankind and nature, a frequent and prominent concern in Crane's fiction and poetry throughout his career. Whereas contemporary writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau) focused on a sympathetic bond on the two elements, Crane wrote from the perspective that human consciousness distanced humans from nature. In The Red Badge of Courage, this distance is paired with a great number of references to animals, and men with animalistic characteristics: people "howl", "squawk", "growl", or "snarl". Since the resurgence of Crane's popularity in the 1920s, The Red Badge of Courage has been deemed a major American text. The novel has been anthologized numerous times, including in Ernest Hemingway's 1942 collection Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. In the introduction, Hemingway wrote that the novel "is one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is.

Crane's later novels have not received as much critical recognition, however. After the success of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane chose to write another tale set in the Bowery. George's Mother is less allegorical and more personal than his two previous novels, and it focuses on the conflict between a church-going, temperance-adhering woman (thought to be based on Crane's own mother) and her single remaining offspring, who is a naive dreamer. Critical response to the novel was mixed. The Third Violet a romance that was written quickly after the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, is typically considered as Crane's attempt to appeal to the popular audience. Crane considered it a "quiet little story", and although it contained autobiographical details, the characters have been deemed inauthentic and stereotypical. Crane's second to last novel, Active Service, revolves around the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, with which the author was well acquainted. Although noted for its satirical take on the melodramatic and highly passionate works that were popular of the nineteenth century, the novel was not successful. It is generally accepted by critics that Crane's work suffered at this point due to the speed which he wrote in order to meet high expenses. His last novel, a suspenseful and picaresque work entitled The O'Ruddy, was finished posthumously by Robert Barr and published in 1903.

Short fiction

Crane wrote many different types of fictional pieces while indiscriminately applying to them terms such as "story", "tale" and "sketch". For this reason, critics have found clear-cut classification of Crane's work problematic. While "The Open Boat" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" are often considered short stories, others are interchangeably identified.

In a 1896 interview with Herbert P. Williams, a reporter for the Boston Herald, Crane stated that he did "not find that short stories are utterly different in character from other fiction. It seems to me that short stories are the easiest things we write. During his brief literary career, he wrote more than a hundred short stories and fictional sketches. The majority of scholarly attention paid to his short fiction has centered on four specific stories: "The Open Boat", "The Blue Hotel", "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky", and "The Monster". The subject matter for these stories and others varied extensively: his early New York City sketches and Bowery tales accurately described the results of industrialization, immigration and the growth of cities and their slums. His collection of short stories, The Little Regiment, covered familiar ground with the American Civil War, a subject that made him famous with The Red Badge of Courage. He wrote many stories that echoed events in his life, such as tales that took place during the Spanish-American War ("Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo") and the infamous shipwreck of the Commodore ("The Open Boat"). H. G. Wells considered "The Open Boat" to be "beyond all question, the crown of all his work", and it is one of the most frequently discussed works in Crane's canon.

Poetry

Many red devils ran from my heart And out upon the page. They were so tiny The pen could mash them. And many struggled in the ink. It was strange To write in this red muck Of things from my heart.

— Stephen Crane

Crane's poems, which he preferred to call "lines", are typically not given as much scholarly attention as his fiction; no anthology contained Crane's verse until 1926. Although it is not certain when Crane began to seriously write poetry, he once stated that his overall poetic aim was "to give my ideas of life as a whole, so far as I know it". The poetic style used in both of his books of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War is Kind, was unconventional for the time in that it was written in free verse without rhyme, meter (like iambic pentameter) or even titles for individual works. They are typically short in length and although several poems, like "Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind", use stanzas and refrains, most of them do not. Crane also differed from his peers and poets of later generations in that he heavily used allegory, dialectic and narrative situations.

Critic Ruth Miller claimed that Crane wrote "an intellectual poetry rather than a poetry that evokes feeling, a poetry that stimulates the mind rather than arouses the heart". In the most complexly organized poems, the significance of the states of mind or feelings is ambiguous, but Crane's poems tend to affirm certain elemental attitudes, beliefs, opinions and stances toward God, man and the universe. The Black Riders in particular is essentially a dramatic concept and the poems provide continuity within the dramatic structure. There is also a dramatic interplay in which there is frequently a major voice reporting an incident seen ("In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, bestial") or experienced ("A learned man came to me once"). The second voice or additional voices represent a point of view which is revealed to be inferior; when these clash, a dominant attitude emerges.

Legacy

In four years, Stephen Crane had published five novels, two volumes of poetry, three short story collections, two books of war stories, and numerous works of short fiction and reporting. Today, however, he is mainly remembered for The Red Badge of Courage, which is heralded as an American classic. The novel has been adapted several times for the screen, including a successful 1951 film by John Huston. By the time of his death, Crane had become one of the best known writers of his generation. His eccentric lifestyle, frequent newspaper reporting, association with other famous authors, and self-expatriation made him somewhat of an international celebrity. Although most stories about his life tended toward the romantic, rumors about his alleged drug use and alcoholism persisted long after his death.

By the early 1920s, however, Crane and his work were nearly forgotten. It was not until Thomas Beer published his biography in 1923, which was then followed by editor Wilson Follett's The Work of Stephen Crane (1925–1927), that Crane's writing came to the attention of a scholarly audience. Crane's reputation was then enhanced by faithful support from friends such as Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and Ford Maddox Ford, all who either published recollections or commented upon their time with Crane. John Berryman's 1950 biography of Crane similarly established him as an important American author. Since 1951 there has been a steady outpouring of articles, monographs and reprints in Crane scholarship.

Today, Crane is considered one of the most innovative writers of the 1890s. His peers, including Conrad and James, as well as later writers such as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Willa Cather, hailed Crane as one of the finest creative spirits of his time. His work was described by Wells as "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative." Wells also went farther in saying that "beyond dispute", Crane was "the best writer of our generation, and his untimely death was an irreparable loss to our literature. Conrad wrote that Crane was an "artist" and "a seer with a gift for rendering the significant on the surface of things and with an incomparable insight into primitive emotions". Crane's work has proved inspirational for future writers; not only have scholars drawn similarities between Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The Red Badge of Courage, but Crane's fiction is thought to have been an important inspiration for Hemingway and his fellow Modernists. In 1936, Hemingway wrote in The Green Hills of Africa that "The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers. Crane's poetry is thought to have been a precursor to the Imagist movement, and his short fiction has also left an impression on American literature; "The Open Boat", "The Blue Hotel", "The Monster" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" are generally considered by critics to be examples of Crane's best work.

Several institutions and places have endeavored to keep Crane's legacy alive. Badenweiler and the house where he died became something of a tourist attraction for its fleeting association with the American author; Alexander Woolcott attested to the fact that, long after Crane's death, tourists would be directed to the room where he died. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a collection of Crane and Cora's personal correspondence dating from 1895 to 1908. The Stephen Crane House in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where the author lived with his family for nine years, serves as a museum dedicated to his life and work.

References

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Crane, Stephen. 1972. The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane. Ed. Joseph Katz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801491304.
• Crane, Stephen. 1993. The Open Boat and Other Stories. Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 0486275477.
• Crane, Stephen. 1917. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

Secondary sources

• Bassan, Maurice. 1967. "Introduction". Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
• Beer, Thomas. 1972. Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0374905193.
• Benfey, Christopher. 1992. The Double Life of Stephen Crane. New York: Knopf. ISBN 0394568648.
• Bergon, Frank. 1975. Stephen Crane's Artistry. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231039050.
• Berryman, John. 1962. Stephen Crane. New York: Meridian.
• Bloom, Harold. 1996. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 9780585253718.
• Cazemajou, Jean. 1969. Stephen Crane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816605262.
• Conrad, Joseph. 1967. "His War Book". Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Maurice Bassan. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
• Davis, Linda H. 1998. Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephan Crane. New York: Mifflin. ISBN 0899199348.
• Gibson, Donald B. 1988. The Red Badge of Courage: Redefining the Hero. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805779612.
• Gibson, Donald B. 1968. The Fiction of Stephen Crane. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
• Gullason, Thomas A. June 1961. "Thematic Patterns in Stephen Crane's Early Novels". Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Hoffman, Daniel. 1967. "Crane and Poetic Tradition". Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Maurice Bassan. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
• Katz, Joseph. 1972. "Introduction". The Complete Poems of Stephen Crane. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801491304.
• Knapp, Bettina L. 1987. Stephen Crane. New York: Ungar Publishing Co.
• Linson, Corwin K. 1958. My Stephen Crane. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
• Nagel, James. 1980. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271002660.
• Robertson, Michael. 1997. Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231109695.
• Rogers, Rodney O. December 1969. "Stephen Crane and Impressionism". Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Schaefer, Michael W. 1996. A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Stephen Crane. New York: G.K. Hall & Co. ISBN 0816172854.
• Shulman, Robert. November 1978. "Community, Perception, and the Development of Stephen Crane: From The Red Badge to 'The Open Boat'". American Literature, Vol. 50, No. 3. Duke, N.C.: Duke University Press.
• Stallman, R. W. 1968. Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: Braziller, Inc.
• Wells, H. G. August 1900. Stephen Crane. From an English Standpoint. New York: North American Review Publishing Company.
• Weatherford, Richard M. 1997. "Introduction". Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415159369.
• Wertheim, Stanley and Paul Sorrentino. 1994. The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871-1900. New York: G. K. Hall & Co.. ISBN 0816172927.
• Wolford, Chester L. 1989. Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805783156.

External links

• Works by Stephen Crane at Internet Archive
• Works by Stephen Crane at Project Gutenberg
• The Red Badge of Courage Site
• The Stephen Crane Society