The Red Badge of Courage (Author Biography)

Author Biography

The youngest of fourteen children, Stephen Crane was born November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, to a Methodist minister, Jonathan Townley Crane, and Mary Helen (Peck) Crane. His interest in writing developed in part from his parents, who wrote articles of a religious nature, and from two of his brothers, who were journalists. Crane began his higher education in 1888 at Hudson River Institute and Claverack College, a military school where he developed an interest in Civil War studies and military training. Throughout his one-year college experience, he wrote for his brother Townley's news service and began a sketch of his famous first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets while still at Syracuse University. In 1891, he quit school to work full time as a reporter with Townley, and to live in the tenements of New York, where he gained firsthand knowledge of poverty.

In 1893, he privately published Maggie under a pseudonym, after several publishers rejected the work on the grounds that his description of slum realities would shock readers. He pioneered in writing naturalistic fiction and poetry: in Maggie, he wrote about a girl who becomes a prostitute and is driven to suicide by poverty and sweatshop labor. In The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, Crane stressed the irony of chance and examined man's weaknesses in the midst of impersonal forces. In this novel, which brought Crane fame, he limited his point of view to a common soldier in the Civil War and dramatized the protagonist's bewilderment and fear as he eventually overcomes his initial cowardice.

Crane also published the poetry collection The Black Riders, and Other Lines in 1895. This volume of free verse foreshadowed the work of the Imagist poets with its concise, vivid images. The religious poems in this volume — written about the same time as The Red Badge — reflect the anguish of Crane's spiritual crisis and preoccupation with questions of faith. His poetry and fiction describe man's alienation in a God-abandoned world of danger and violence. During this time, Crane continued to work as a journalist, traveling throughout the American West and Mexico for a news syndicate, and later he used these experiences as the basis for fictional works. Crane wrote four volumes of short stories, which include such notable works as "The Open Boat" and "The Monster." His free-verse poems in War is Kind (1899) demonstrated once again how Crane was a pathfinder for presentday poets devoted to experimental reform and nonsentimentality.

In 1879 Crane met Cora Taylor, the proprietor of a hotel, nightclub, and brothel. Together as common-law husband and wife, they moved to England where Crane formed literary friendships with Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James. Shortly after this move, Crane left to report on the Spanish-American War for the New York World, an assignment he accepted, in part, to escape financial debts. Although Crane was ill when he returned to England, he continued writing fiction to satisfy his artistic needs and to earn money to pay his debts. One of these exercises was Active Service, which records his experiences as a war correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War. Critics often describe it as uneven and sprawling. By 1900, Crane's health had rapidly deteriorated due to a general disregard of his physical well-being. After several respiratory attacks, he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight in Badenweiler, Germany. His young life was a prolific one, transcended by his increasing fame as more and more readers recognized Crane's brilliant work. His Collected Works were published from 1925 to 1926 in twelve volumes, and in the 1950s in ten volumes.