Stephen Crane

Early Life

• Youngest of 14 children
• His father, a Methodist minister, died when he was nine.
• Moved to New York in 1890 after two years of college
• Lived in a Bowery boardinghouse while freelancing

Early Work

• 1893: Maggie: A Girl of the Street
• A sympathetic study of an innocent and abused slum girl's descent into prostitution and her eventual suicide.
• Crane published the book under a pseudonym and at his own expense
• Maggie left him to struggle as a poor and unknown freelance journalist until he was befriended by the influential critic William Dean Howells.

Fame

• 1895: The Red Badge of Courage and his first book of poems, The Black Riders
• Courage is a study of a young soldier trying to find reality amid the conflict of fierce warfare. The book's hero, Henry Fleming, survives his own fear, cowardice, and egotism to discover courage, humility, and perhaps wisdom in the confused combat of an unnamed Civil War battle.
• Crane had never seen war.

War

• Wanted to see war to determine if he had captured it correctly
• 1897: Went to Cuba
• The ship Commodore on which he was traveling sank, and Crane finally rowed into shore in a dinghy with the captain, cook, and oiler.
• The result was one of the world's great short stories, The Open Boat.

War

• Went to Greece to report the Greco-Turkish War for the New York Journal (Hearst)
• 1898: Crane covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba, first for the New York World (Pulitzer) and then for the New York Journal (Hearst).
• Suffered from tuberculosis and malaria

Writing Style

• Crane was known for setting, dramatic action, and characters.
• Thought to be influential in the novels of Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, the story of a small-town girl who comes to the big city), and James T. Farrell (Studs Lonigan, a trilogy about a lower middle-class family in Chicago).