Stephen Crane

Crane, Stephen (1871-1900), American novelist and brilliant exponent of the short story. Best remembered for The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a story of a young soldier's struggle with cowardice widely praised by American civil war veterans as an accurate exploration of the realities of combat, although at the time the author had no personal experience to draw upon. Anxious to live what he had imagined and despite suffering from tuberculosis, Crane was a war correspondent for New York newspapers during the Graeco-Turkish war and the Spanish-American war in Cuba, where he contracted malaria and fatally exacerbated his underlying condition.

— Hugh Bicheno

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), an American fiction writer and poet, was also a newspaper reporter. His novel "The Red Badge of Courage" stands high among the world's books depicting warfare.

After the Civil War, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and others established realism as the standard mode of American fiction. In the 1890s younger writers tried to enlarge the territory of realism with impressionist, symbolist, and even new romantic approaches. Of these pioneers, Stephen Crane was the most influential.

Crane was born on Nov. 1, 1871, the fourteenth and last child of Mary Helen Crane and the Reverend Doctor Jonathan Townley Crane, presiding elder of the Newark, N.J., district of the Methodist Church. A frail child, Stephen moved with his family from one parsonage to another during his first 8 years. In 1880, with the death of his father, his mother moved her family to Asbury Park, N.J. Stephen was exposed early to writing as a career: his mother wrote on religious topics and lectured for the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and his brother Townley worked as a newspaper reporter.

In 1888 Crane entered military school, where he made an impressive record on the drill field and the baseball diamond but not in the classroom. Without graduating he went to Lafayette College, then to Syracuse University. He flunked out, but whatever his academic record, his time had not been wasted: in his fraternity house Crane, aged 20, had written the first draft of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Returning to Asbury Park as a reporter under his brother for the New York Tribune, Crane attended Hamlin Garland's lectures on the realistic writers. Garland was interested in the young writer, read his manuscripts, and guided his reading.

In 1891 Crane's mother died. Crane spent much of the next year in Sullivan County, N.Y., where another brother practiced law. Five "Sullivan County Sketches" were published in the Tribune and Cosmopolitan (his first magazine appearance). He went frequently to New York City, haunting the Bowery in search of experience and literary material. When he returned to Asbury Park, he lost his job on the Tribune (and his brother's too) by writing an accurate description of a labor parade that undermined his Republican publisher's standing in an election campaign. This year also brought unhappy endings to two romances.

Career as Novelist

In autumn 1892 Crane moved to New York City. By spring he submitted a second version of Maggie to a family friend, Richard Gilder, editor of the Century. Gilder tried to explain his rejection of the manuscript, but Crane interrupted bluntly, "You mean that the story's too honest?" Honest the story is, and blunt and brutal. It shows Maggie as a simple, ignorant girl bullied by her drunken mother, delivered to a seducer by her brother, driven by the seducer into prostitution and, finally, to suicide. In approach the novel is akin to the "veritism" of Garland and the realism of Howells, but it differs stylistically in its ironic tone, striking imagery (especially color imagery), and its compression."Impressionism" is the term often applied to the very personal style Crane was developing. Convinced that no publisher would dare touch his "shocking" novel, Crane printed it at his own expense, using the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The book went unnoticed and unpurchased, except for two copies. Garland, however, admired it and called it to the attention of Howells, then America's most influential man of letters, who recognized Crane's achievement and tried unsuccessfully to get the novel reissued.

By summer 1893 Crane was well into what was to be a Civil War novel. As research he read Century magazine's series "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" and, it is believed, traveled in Virginia to interview Confederate veterans. What he found missing from the history books was the actual sensation any single individual experiences in battle; this is what The Red Badge of Courage conveys. Just as Maggie represents every girl victimized by a slum environment, so Henry Fleming represents every recruit who reels through the noise and glare of war. Neither character had a name in Crane's first drafts: they are "every woman," "every man," buffeted by forces they neither control nor understand. Though there were delays - painful ones for the penniless author - this book was destined for early success. A shortened version was serialized in the Philadelphia Press and hundreds of other newspapers in 1894. The instant critical and popular enthusiasm spread to England when the complete book was published the following year. A revised version of Maggie was issued along with an earlier novel about slum life, George's Mother, in 1896. The syndicate that had arranged newspaper publication of Red Badge of Courage sent Crane to the West and Mexico to sketch whatever struck his fancy.

Poet and Journalist

Crane's first book of poems, The Black Riders, was on the press before his departure. "A condensed Whitman," the Nation aptly called him. His "lines," as he called his poems, are terse, natural, and forceful; ironic and unsentimental. Their language is in the best sense journalistic, just as Crane's reportage had been from the beginning poetic.

The excursion west and to Mexico produced sensitive sketches and materials for a number of Crane's finest stories. Back in New York, he published newspaper articles critical of the city's corrupt police. The police made New York uncomfortable for Crane, so he departed for Cuba to report the anti-Spanish insurrection there. Enroute he stopped in Jacksonville, Fla., where he met Cora Stewart, a handsome New England woman in her late 20s, separated from her husband, the son of a British baronet. She was the owner of the Hotel de Dream, an elegant boardinghouse-cum nightclub-cum brothel and gave it all up to become (quite without clerical or legal formalities) "Mrs. Stephen Crane."

In spite of this "marriage," Crane left for Cuba aboard a small steamer. It sank on its first day out. Crane's heroic role in the disaster - he barely escaped with the captain and two other men - evoked his best short story, "The Open Boat."

War Correspondent

For the Hearst newspapers Crane covered the war between Greece and Turkey. Crane, it appears, wanted to see if war was really as he had depicted it in Red Badge of Courage: it was. But the trip yielded mediocre war reportage and a bad novel, Active Service (1899). Cora had followed Crane to Greece; they next went to England, where Crane finished his powerful novella The Monster and three of his finest short stories, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," "Death and the Child," and "The Blue Hotel."

The Spanish-American War in 1898 provided new employment. Crane sent distinguished reports to the New York World. He was with Cora in England when his second volume of poems, War Is Kind, appeared in 1899. Sick and aware of nearing death, he wrote furiously. That spring Cora took him to the Continent, where he died on June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany, of tuberculosis. His haunting tales of childhood, Whilomville Stories, and Cuban tales, Wounds in the Rain appeared later that year.

Further Reading

Robert W. Stallman, Stephen Crane: A Biography (1968), is the authoritative source on Crane's life. The two most interesting studies - one biographical, the other critical - are by poets: John Berryman, Stephen Crane (1950), and Daniel G. Hoffman, The Poetry of Stephen Crane (1956). Also recommended are Maurice Bassan, ed., Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967), and, for views of Crane in the context of his period, Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism (1965), and Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s (1966).

(click to enlarge)
Stephen Crane, detail of a painting by C.K. Linson, 1896. (credit: Courtesy of University of Virginia Library, Barrett Library of American Literature)

(born Nov. 1, 1871, Newark, N.J., U.S. — died June 5, 1900, Badenweiler, Baden, Ger.) U.S. novelist and short-story writer. Crane briefly attended college before moving to New York City. His Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a sympathetic study of a slum girl's descent into prostitution, was a milestone of literary naturalism. He achieved international fame with his masterwork, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), depicting the psychological turmoil of a young Civil War soldier, and with his first book of poems, The Black Riders (1895). While traveling as a war correspondent, his ship sank and he almost drowned, resulting in his great story "The Open Boat" (1898). His story collections include The Little Regiment (1896), The Monster (1899), and Whilomville Stories (1900). He died at 28 of tuberculosis.

For more information on Stephen Crane, visit Britannica.com.

(1871-1900), writer. Crane, the son of a Methodist minister and a leader in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, grew up in Port Jervis, New York, which became the small town of his boyhood memory, just as the hunting and fishing country of Sullivan County became a (tame) kind of wilderness memory for him. His early, somewhat fantasized Sullivan Country Sketches and his late, partly realistic Whilomville Stories drew on these resources.

In 1883 Crane moved with his widowed mother to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where a few years later he was to work as a reporter for his brother's news agency. After a semester at Lafayette College, he transferred to Syracuse University in 1891. Writing and baseball were more interesting to him than his studies, and he left college at the end of the term. That summer he met Hamlin Garland, whose popular lectures on realism and impressionism helped shape his literary ideal--a "personal honesty" about the world as seen "with his own pair of eyes."

Crane began his career in New York, where doing sketches of the slums helped him write his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). After searching old soldiers' narratives in vain for "how they felt in those scraps," he put vivid inner detail into The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Since he sold the novel outright, his chief benefit from its critical and popular success was his winning journalistic commissions like the one that took him to the West and Mexico in 1895. While he was in Mexico, his first book of poems, The Black Riders, came out, containing eerie visions and succinct parables in free verse that he liked for giving his "ideas of life as a whole."

Crane's best work is his short fiction. In his later novels, he often mixed his fine honesty with the banalities of genteel fiction, but in his short stories he used conventions of vulgar entertainment like the Wild West tale. He could brilliantly exaggerate and ironically deflate. He wrote in a clean simple prose that he would suddenly, unpredictably illuminate with vivid, expressive touches, like the monstrous imaginings that go with the young soldier's battles with fear in The Red Badge.

Late in 1896, Crane went to Florida en route to cover the Cuban revolution. On January 2, 1897, he was aboard the Commodore when it sank a few hours out of Jacksonville. The thirty-hour ordeal that followed is the basis of his greatest story, "The Open Boat," a tale of endurance, comradeship, and deep realization of the contingency of things.

Back in port, Crane was cared for by Cora Taylor, proprietress of the Hotel de Dream, who then accompanied him to the Greco-Turkish War as the "first woman war correspondent" and afterward settled with him in England as "Mrs. Stephen Crane." In the autumn and winter of 1897-1898 he wrote a series of short stories, among them "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" and "The Blue Hotel." But short stories, even great ones, could not support the Crane household. Debts and anxiety mounted.

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Crane tried to enlist in the navy but, failing that, signed on as a correspondent. After the war, he lingered in Havana until year's end with both his health and his finances deteriorating.

Upon returning to England, he enjoyed literary recognition from the public and from such friends as Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Despite worsening tuberculosis, he managed to finish a second volume of poems, a volume of Cuban stories, his Whilomville tales, and a good deal of hackwork before he died in 1900, deeply in debt.

Crane's gift for misadventure continued beyond his death. Thomas Beer's Stephen Crane (1923), the earliest biography, has been discredited, and the letters that are quoted there, unless independent evidence survives, cannot be taken as authentic.

Bibliography:

John Berryman, Stephen Crane (1950); Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, eds., The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988).

Author:

J. C. Levenson

See also Literature.

His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a grimly realistic story of slum life, was unpopular but gained the young writer the friendship of Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895, restored ed. 1982), brought him wide and deserved fame. Set during the Civil War, the novel traces the development of a young recruit, Henry Fleming, through fear, illusion, panic, and cowardice, to a quiet, humble heroism. This remarkable account of the emotions of a soldier under fire is all the more amazing since Crane had never been in battle. On the strength of the novel he served as a foreign correspondent in Cuba and in Greece.

Around 1897 Crane married Cora Taylor, who ran a brothel in Florida. His marriage, coupled with his unorthodox personality, aroused scandalous rumors, including those that he was a drug addict and a satanist. Because of this slander Crane spent his last years abroad; he died of tuberculosis in Germany at the age of 28.

Crane was a superb literary stylist who emphasized irony and paradox and made innovative use of imagery and symbolism. Thus, although realistic, his novels are highly individual. Crane also wrote superb short stories and poems. The title stories of The Open Boat and Other Tales (1898) and The Monster and Other Stories (1899) are considered among the finest stories in English. His two books of epigrammatic free verse, The Black Rider (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), anticipated several strains of 20th-century poetry.

Bibliography

See his works, ed. by F. Bowers (10 vol., 1969–76); letters, ed. by S. Wertheim and P. Sorrentino (2 vol., 1988); biographies by J. Berryman (1950, repr. 1975), R. W. Stallman (1968), and L. H. Davis (1998); studies by M. Holton (1972), R. M. Weatherford, ed. (1973), F. Bergon (1975), D. Halliburton (1989), and C. Benfey (1992); bibliography by R. W. Stallman (1972).

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane, 1900
Pseudonym:	Johnston Smith
Born:	November 1 1871(1871--) Newark, NJ, USA
Died:	June 5 1900(1900--) Badenweiler, Germany
Occupation:	novelist, poet and journalist
Nationality:	US-American
Writing period:	Naturalism
Debut works:	Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

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, best known for the novel Red Badge of Courage. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.

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. He wrote 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), 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 innovative, painterly writing style. The Red Badge received intense international acclaim, while Maggie, re-issued in 1896, found a much less welcoming reception. [1]

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 short story masterpiece, The Open Boat [2] (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), whose main character is a journalist covering that war.

Partly to escape his 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.^[1]

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 emphasized impressionistic imagery and biblical symbolism rather than graphic 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.” [3]

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.” [4]

In popular culture

The best known film of The Red Badge of Courage was directed by John Huston and released in 1951. [5]

An image of Crane is barely visible on the The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. [6]

He is mentioned in the novel Changing Places (1975), one of British novelist David Lodge's campus novels.

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

In 2007 Edmund White published the novel Hotel de Dream, based on the probably apocryphal story (from the memoirs of a Crane friend, James Gibbons Huneker) that Crane had written and then destroyed a 40-page novella fragment on a boy prostitute.^[2]

References

John Berryman, Stephen Crane. 1962.

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

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Stephen Crane

• 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)
• Works by Stephen Crane at Project Gutenberg
• A Crane biography and links to most of Crane's published work. [7]
• Full biography, summaries of important works, and useful quotesA student's blog and paper-writing site.
• [8] 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
• Wells, H. G. (Aug. 1900). "Stephen Crane, from an English Standpoint". North American Monthly Review 171: 233-242. Retrieved on 2007-01-04. 

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