Stephen Crane
(1871–1900)
Stephen Crane’s life was short and brilliant. For many critics, he is America’s first modern writer. He experimented with literary forms that led the way to a new American literature, and his life was as unconventional as his works. Luckily for the world, Crane worked hard and fast, producing a major body of work before he died at age twenty-eight.
The youngest of fourteen children of a Methodist minister and his devout wife, Crane spent most of his childhood in upstate New York with a yearning to become a baseball star. When he was about sixteen years old, he went to work for his brother’s news agency in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Later, struggling to make a living as a reporter in New York City, Crane found himself drawn to the city’s underside. What he saw as his education as an artist on the Bowery (New York’s skid row) kept him hungry and often ill.
With a story about war in manuscript, Crane moved into the Art Students’ League on East Twenty-third Street. He had already written his first significant fiction based on his explorations of the city’s slums and saloons. This was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a somber, shocking novel, which involves brutality, alcoholism, prostitution, and suicide.
Maggie revealed Crane as a pioneer of naturalism—a literary movement that dissects human instincts and behavior and examines the social environment that conditions people to turn out as they do. The novel was impossibly grim for popular magazines, and Crane borrowed $700 to have it printed. The copies of the little yellow paperback lay piled in his rented room for want of readers.
Crane’s apparent failure with Maggie was followed by a triumph—his story about war became a short novel titled The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Using an impressionistic technique, Crane filtered the events of the novel through the eyes of Henry Fleming, a young soldier at the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville. Crane had been born after the Civil War, but he had researched and read about it, interviewed veterans, and seen the famous battlefield photographs attributed to Mathew Brady.
The Red Badge of Courage made Crane into a celebrity, a national expert on war, and he spent the rest of his short life writing about it for the newspapers. Crane became a prototype of the adventurous correspondent who not only writes about sensational events but also lives a sensational life, delighting in shocking conservative readers.
One of the fascinating elements of Crane’s life was the degree to which he interwove his fiction and his life. No experience was wasted on him. In late 1896, Crane sailed to Cuba on the ammunition-laden Commodore to cover a rebellion against the Spanish. When he was shipwrecked off the Florida coast, he had to endure a thirty-hour struggle against the sea. Typically, he kept a cool head when the ship was sunk, making sure to remove his gold-filled money belt before making the dangerous swim to shore. Then he described it all brilliantly in his short-story masterpiece, "The Open Boat" (1898).
Before this ill-fated journey, Crane had stopped off at the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville, Florida, and had taken up with the hostess, Cora Taylor. She soon decided that she would stay with him and become the first female war correspondent. This oddly matched couple later went off to Greece to cover a war. They settled eventually in England, renting a huge, dilapidated, medieval house in Sussex.
All these adventures were taking their toll on Crane’s delicate health. Still, he continued to travel and write, desperate now to pay for Cora’s extravagant domestic life. In 1899, he produced his second volume of poems, War Is Kind. Tuberculosis, however, was sapping his strength. Crane died in June 1900, at a sanitarium in the Black Forest of Germany.
