Stephen Crane


 * For the U.S. Continental Congress delegate, see Stephen Crane (delegate).

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist. He was born in Newark, New Jersey, the 14th child of a Methodist minister. He died at age 28.

Biography
Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister. His father died in 1880 and Crane was raised by his devout mother, who died in 1890. Crane studied at Lafayette College and Syracuse University, but attained degrees from neither. After his mother's death Crane moved to New York City, where he lived a bohemian life working as a free-lance writer and journalist, writing articles for, among others, the New York Tribune.

Crane observed the poor in the Bowery slums as research for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), which was a milestone in uncompromising realism and in the early development of literary naturalism. Crane had to print the book at his own expense with money borrowed from his brother, and released it under the pseudonym "Johnston Smith." It was not a commercial success or favored by critics of the time, but won the admiration of Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells.

Maggie, for its few American readers, and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) for much of the international reading public, introduced Crane's richly innovative writing style. The Red Badge received intense international acclaim, while Maggie, re-issued in 1896, found a much less welcoming reception. 

Now a well-paid war correspondent, Crane was shipwrecked en route to Cuba in early 1897. He and a small party of passengers spent 30 hours adrift off the coast of Florida, an experience which Crane would later transform into his most famous short story, The Open Boat (1898). In Florida Crane met Cora Stewart-Taylor (July 12 1865 - Sep 4 1910), the proprietress of a Jacksonville brothel named the Hotel de Dream. In 1897 or 1898 they were married. Taylor was also a writer and she and Crane worked together as war correspondents during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. This experience was the basis for his novel Active Service (1899), which has a journalist covering that war as its hero.

Partly to escape her past, and partly to leave behind the abuse and ridicule the American press had bestowed on his work, especially his first collection of poetry, The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895), Crane and Cora moved to England. There Crane was already lionized and The Red Badge of Courage greatly admired. In 1897 the couple settled in Brede Place, an old estate in Sussex, England. Crane befriended writers Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Henry James.

After a fruitless attempt to improve his health in Greece, Crane died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey.

Literary reception, influence and legacy
Crane is noted for his early employment of naturalism, a literary style in which characters face realistically portrayed and often bleak circumstances, but Crane added impressionistic imagery and biblical symbolism to the austere realism. Crane's realism, writes William Peden, "is often more impressionistic than photographic; his interest in psychological probing, his innovations in technique and style, and his use of imagery, paradox and symbolism give much of his best work a romantic rather than a naturalistic quality. Both realism and symbolism, the two major directions of modern fiction, have their American beginnings in Crane's work." [from "Stephen Crane," Encyclopedia Americana, Volume 8, pp. 150-151 (1994)].

H.G. Wells adds that the painterly quality of Crane's prose, "the great influence of the studio," should not be ignored: "...in the persistent selection of the essential elements of an impression, in the ruthless exclusion of mere information, in the direct vigor with which the selected points are made, there is Whistler even more than there is Tolstoi in The Red Badge of Courage." Wells then selects, "almost haphazard," the following lines from that work to illustrate his point:

"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."

The Red Badge of Courage, about a young soldier's initiation into the horrors and ironies of war set during the American Civil War, won international acclaim for its vividness and psychological depth. Crane had never experienced battle, but had read and conducted interviews with a number of veterans, some of whom may have suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. Ernest Hemingway, who would take up several of Crane's settings and themes, called the book an American classic, and Alfred Kazin writes that The Red Badge of Courage "has long been considered the first great ‘modern’ novel of war by an American—the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism.”

In ''Stephen Crane. From an English Standpoint'' (1900), written shortly after Crane's death, Wells sums up Crane the literary figure as "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative—beginning, as a growing mind needs begin, with the record of impressions, a record of a vigor and intensity beyond all precedent.”

In popular culture
The best known film of The Red Badge of Courage was directed by John Huston and released in 1951. 

An image of Crane is barely visible on the The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. 

He is mentioned in the novel Changing Places (1975) is the first "campus novel" by British novelist David Lodge.

One of Crane's poems was the basis for the 2001 film, The Dark Riders (film).

In 2007 Edmund White published a novel, Hotel de Dream, based on the probably apocryphal story that Crane wrote and then destroyed a 40-page novella fragment on a boy prostitute. Among the other writers who feature in the novel are H. G. Wells, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Hamlin Garland and Arnold Bennett. The story about the manuscript comes from the memoirs of Crane's friend James Gibbons Huneker, while the title of the novel is also the name of the Jacksonville bordello run by Cora Crane.

Published as

 * Prose & Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of Courage; Stories, Sketches, Journalism; The Black Riders & War Is Kind   (J.C. Levenson, ed.) (Library of America, 1984) ISBN 978-0-94045017-2.

References and further reading

 * The Red Badge of Courage Site
 * Civil War Literature
 * Poems by Stephen Crane at PoetryFoundation.org
 * The Stephen Crane Society includes links to texts on the web, texts of some works not available elsewhere, bibliographies, and queries and replies about Crane.
 * Literary Encyclopedia(Subscription required)
 * A Crane biography and links to most of Crane's published work.
 * Full biography, summaries of important works, and useful quotesA student's blog and paper-writing site.
 * Encyclopedia of World Biography on Stephen Crane.
 * The Black Rider and Other Lines at Poets' Corner
 * War is Kind and Other Lines at Poets' Corner
 * Stephen Crane's Nasty Little Trick in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"at Mr. Renaissance: The Christian Living and Apologetics Website
 * Free audiobook of "War Is Kind" from LibriVox
 * Stephen Crane's Gravesite
 * Crane's religion
 * Free online literature of Stephen Crane
 * Free online literature of Stephen Crane

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