Stephen Crane

• 1. Introduction

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  Stephen Crane died on the 5th of June, 1900, in a health spa on the edge of Germany's Black Forest. He was 28 years old. In the decades that followed, he was nearly forgotten. Then critics looked again, and what they found was a writer who had done something almost no one else had managed: put the reader inside the skull of a frightened soldier and made every detail feel true, without ever having seen a battle himself.

  How does a man born in Newark in 1871 produce a Civil War novel so convincing that Ernest Hemingway would later call it "one of the finest books of our literature"? How does a minister's son become the kind of person who wades ashore with Marines in Cuba, survives a shipwreck off the coast of Florida, and travels to a war in Greece with a woman who becomes history's first female war correspondent? And why, when everything was falling into place, did tuberculosis claim him before he turned 29?

  The answers begin in the parlors and pews of a strict Methodist household, and they end in a room in Badenweiler, Germany, where tourists would ask to be shown the spot where Crane had lain.

• 2. A Minister's Fourteenth Child

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  Jonathan Townley Crane was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and his wife Mary Helen had already buried four children in infancy by the time Stephen arrived on the 1st of November, 1871 - the fourteenth and last child born to the couple. Mary Helen was 45. The boy they nicknamed "Stevie" joined eight surviving brothers and sisters in a household that moved to Port Jervis, New York, in 1876.

  The Cranes traced their lineage to Jaspar Crane, a founder of New Haven Colony who had arrived from England in 1639. Stephen himself was named after a putative founder of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and after a great-great-grandfather who had served as a New Jersey delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The family name carried weight, but the household was not a prosperous one.

  Crane taught himself to read before he was four. At age three, while imitating his brother Townley's handwriting, he asked his mother how to spell "O." In December 1879, he wrote a poem about wanting a dog for Christmas, his first surviving piece of writing. He completed two school grades in six weeks after enrolling in January 1880, a feat he recalled with the self-deprecating observation that it "sounds like the lie of a fond mother at a teaparty."

  His father died on the 16th of February, 1880 - Stephen was eight. Some 1,400 people attended the funeral, more than double the size of Dr. Crane's congregation. The losses kept coming. His sister Agnes, 15 years his senior and the person who had raised him most directly, died on the 10th of June, 1884, of meningitis at 28. That same stretch of years also took Townley's wife Fannie (of Bright's disease) and his brother Luther (struck by a train while working as a railroad flagman). In the span of six years, Stephen's immediate family absorbed four deaths.

• 3. School, Baseball, and Bad Grades

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  Crane wrote his first known story, "Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle", when he was 14. In late 1885 he enrolled at Pennington Seminary, a ministry-focused boarding school about seven miles north of Trenton where his father had once served as principal. After two years he transferred to Claverack College, a quasi-military school, which he later called "the happiest period of my life although I was not aware of it."

  At Claverack, Crane was remembered as erratic - lucky to pass math and science exams, yet "far in advance of his fellow students in his knowledge of History and Literature." He excelled on the baseball diamond, playing catcher, and rose quickly through the ranks of the student battalion. Not having a middle name, as was the custom among classmates, he began signing himself "Stephen T. Crane" simply to blend in. He was considered friendly but also moody and aloof, and one classmate described him as "indeed physically attractive without being handsome."

  The school housed veterans of the Civil War on its staff, and those conversations likely gave Crane early material that would surface years later in The Red Badge of Courage. In mid-1888, he became his brother Townley's assistant at a New Jersey shore news bureau, spending every summer there through 1892. His first bylined publication appeared in the February 1890 issue of the Claverack College Vidette - an article on Henry M. Stanley's quest to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone.

  Family pressure redirected him toward Lafayette College to study mining engineering; he registered on September 12, promptly joined the baseball team and the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and ended the semester having completed only four of seven courses. After one semester he moved to Syracuse University, where he attended essentially one class - English Literature - and spent the rest of his time writing. He attended a Delta Upsilon chapter meeting on the 12th of June, 1891, and then left college for good.

• 4. Maggie and the Bowery

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  In the fall of 1891, Crane moved into his brother Edmund's house in Lakeview, near Paterson, New Jersey, and began making regular trips into New York City to report on its tenement districts. He was drawn specifically to the Bowery, a small neighborhood in lower Manhattan where, after the Civil War, shops and mansions had given way to saloons, dance halls, and brothels. He frequented all of them, later insisting it was for research. He found the slums "open and plain, with nothing hidden" and concluded that nothing honest had yet been written about them.

  On the 7th of December, 1891, his mother died at 64. The 20-year-old appointed his brother Edmund as his guardian and pressed forward. He showed two Sullivan County tales to Tribune editor Willis Fletcher Johnson, a family friend, and fourteen of those pieces ran in the paper between February and July of 1892. That same summer a report he wrote about the Junior Order of United American Mechanics' parade ignited a controversy - his juxtaposition of the "bronzed, slope-shouldered, uncouth" marchers with spectators in "summer gowns, lace parasols, tennis trousers" read to many as ridicule. The Tribune, whose owner was that year's Republican vice-presidential candidate, quickly apologized and did not publish Crane's work again.

  The novel he had been building through all this emerged as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Richard Watson Gilder rejected it for The Century Magazine. Crane published it privately in late February or early March 1893, spending $869 for 1,100 copies from a shop that normally printed medical books and religious tracts. He used the pseudonym "Johnston Smith" - chosen, he told the artist Corwin Knapp Linson, as "the commonest name I could think of." Hamlin Garland reviewed it in The Arena as "the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read." Nobody bought it. Crane gave away a hundred copies and later recalled: "Poor Maggie! She was one of my first loves."

  Critics would later call it "the first dark flower of American Naturalism." Its characters were drawn not from the middle class but from the lowest rungs of the Bowery, and Crane rendered their dialect without apology - the title character rebuking her brother with lines like "Yeh knows it puts mudder out when yes comes home half dead."

• 5. Writing War Without Having Seen It

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  In March 1893, while having his portrait painted at the studio of his friend Corwin Knapp Linson, Crane became absorbed in back issues of The Century magazine covering famous battles and commanders from the Civil War. He was frustrated by what he found. "I wonder that some of those fellows don't tell how they felt in those scraps," he said. "They spout enough of what they did, but they're as emotionless as rocks."

  He set out to do what those accounts had failed to do: capture the psychology of fear in battle. He conceived the story from the point of view of a young private filled initially with visions of glory, then quickly disillusioned. He borrowed the private's surname, "Fleming," from his sister-in-law's maiden name. Writing from around midnight until four or five in the morning, he worked in ink on legal-sized paper because he could not afford a typewriter. If he changed a word, he rewrote the whole page.

  McClure's Magazine, then the leading publication for Civil War writing, held the manuscript for months without committing. Crane ultimately brought it to Irving Bacheller of the Bacheller-Johnson Newspaper Syndicate, which published it in serial form across some half-dozen papers from the 3rd to the 9th of December, 1894. Bacheller said "its quality was immediately felt and recognized." An editorial in the Philadelphia Press declared that Crane "is a new name now and unknown, but everybody will be talking about him if he goes on as he has begun."

  Appleton published the novel in September 1895. For four months it sat in the top six on bestseller lists across the country. H. L. Mencken, who was about 15 at the time, later wrote that it arrived on the literary scene "like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky." Joseph Conrad, who would become a close friend, wrote that the novel "detonated... with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive." Appleton issued two or three printings in 1895 and as many as eleven more in 1896. It was believed the fictional battle was based on the engagement at Chancellorsville; Crane may also have interviewed veterans of the 124th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, known as the Orange Blossoms, in Port Jervis.

• 6. Scandal, Shipwreck, and Cora Taylor

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  At 2 a.m. on the 16th of September, 1896, Crane escorted two chorus girls and a woman named Dora Clark from a Broadway resort where he had been interviewing them for a series he was writing. A plainclothes officer named Charles Becker arrested Clark and one other woman for solicitation. Crane interceded and, against the advice of the arresting sergeant, gave a statement: "I only know that while with me she acted respectably, and that the policeman's charge was false." The case against Clark was dropped. The story spread to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond. The Chicago Dispatch noted with a quip that "association with women in scarlet is not necessarily a 'Red Badge of Courage.'"

  When Clark later pressed charges of false arrest and Becker came to trial, Crane returned to testify despite advice from Theodore Roosevelt, then the Police Commissioner. Police raided Crane's apartment and interviewed his associates in an effort to discredit him. The officer was exonerated on the 16th of October, and Crane's reputation was badly damaged.

  Late in 1896, Crane left New York for Jacksonville, Florida, carrying $700 in Spanish gold from the Bacheller-Johnson syndicate to report on Cuba for the impending Spanish-American War. He registered at the St. James Hotel under the alias Samuel Carleton. Within days he met Cora Taylor, who was 31, had already been through two brief marriages, and ran a downtown establishment called the Hotel de Dream. They began a relationship that would last the rest of his life.

  On New Year's Eve, Crane finally boarded the SS Commodore, bound for Cuba. The ship sailed with 27 or 28 men and a cargo of supplies and ammunition for Cuban rebels. It struck a sandbar in a dense fog on the St. Johns River, was towed off, ran aground again, and then began taking on water about 16 miles from Mosquito Inlet after its pumps failed. Crane described the engine room as resembling "a scene at this time taken from the middle kitchen of hades." The lifeboats were lowered in the early hours of the 2nd of January, 1897, and the ship sank at 7 a.m. Crane was one of the last off, leaving in a ten-foot dinghy with three other men including the captain. They drifted for a day and a half before attempting to land at Daytona Beach. The dinghy overturned in the surf; one man died. Crane, having lost the gold given to him for his journey, wired Cora Taylor. She traveled to Daytona and brought him back to Jacksonville four days after he had first departed on the Commodore. The ordeal became "The Open Boat."

• 7. England, War, and the Final Years

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  Crane signed on with William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal to cover the Greco-Turkish conflict in early 1897, and sailed first to England. He and Taylor arrived in Athens in early April; Turkey declared war on Greece on the 17th. Taylor remained in Athens and wrote dispatches under the pseudonym "Imogene Carter" for the New York Journal - a position Crane had arranged for her. Historians would recognize her as the first woman war correspondent. Crane witnessed the Turkish assault on Greek forces at Velestino and encountered a puppy in the middle of the fighting, which he immediately claimed and named "Velestino, the Journal dog." Greece and Turkey signed an armistice on the 20th of May.

  The couple settled in England, first briefly in Limpsfield, Surrey, then in Ravensbrook, a plain brick villa in Oxted. The area drew members of the Fabian Society and writers including Edmund Gosse, Ford Madox Ford, and Edward Garnett. In October 1897, Crane met the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad, with whom he would have what he called a "warm and endless friendship." H. G. Wells was another close friend of the Oxted years.

  Financial pressure was constant. His third novel, The Third Violet, drew harsh reviews. His war letters were criticized as self-centered. Even as The Red Badge of Courage reached fourteen printings in the United States and six in England, Crane was writing furiously to survive - producing The Monster, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," "The Blue Hotel," and "Death and the Child" in rapid succession. An ex-lover, Amy Leslie, sued him for $550; The New York Times reported that she had given him $800 in November 1896 and that he had repaid only a quarter.

  He covered the Spanish-American War for the World, going ashore with Marines at Guantánamo Bay in early June 1898. After being diagnosed with yellow fever and then malaria, he filed more than 20 dispatches in three months before the paper fired him for not delivering sufficient value. He returned to England on the 11th of January, 1899. Rent on Ravensbrook was a year in arrears. Friends offered the couple Brede Place, a 14th-century manor in Sussex with neither electricity nor running water, at a modest rent. In December, they hosted a Christmas party there attended by Conrad, Henry James, and Wells that lasted several days. On the 29th of December, Crane suffered a severe pulmonary hemorrhage.

  By early 1900 he had recovered enough to work on his final novel, The O'Ruddy, completing 25 of its 33 chapters. Conrad visited and later wrote that his friend's "wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes." On the 28th of May, Crane and Taylor arrived at Badenweiler, in the Black Forest. He continued to dictate passages for the novel's completion. He died there on the 5th of June, 1900. In his will he left everything to Taylor, who brought his body back to New Jersey. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside.

• 8. The Work That Outlasted the Man

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  In four years of intense productivity, Crane published five novels, two volumes of poetry, three short story collections, and two books of war stories, in addition to enormous quantities of journalism. H. G. Wells called his writing "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period" and named him, without qualification, "the best writer of our generation." Conrad described Crane as "a seer with a gift for rendering the significant on the surface of things and with an incomparable insight into primitive emotions."

  By the early 1920s, almost no one was reading him. Thomas Beer's 1923 biography and Wilson Follett's edition of The Work of Stephen Crane (published 1925-1927) brought him back to critical attention. John Berryman's 1950 biography further established his standing. Since 1951, scholarly output on Crane has been continuous.

  Crane's poetry, which he called his "lines," was equally unconventional - free verse without rhyme, meter, or even titles for individual poems. No anthology included his verse until 1926. Critic Ruth Miller described it as "an intellectual poetry rather than a poetry that evokes feeling, a poetry that stimulates the mind rather than arouses the heart." Scholars have since linked it to the later Imagist movement, and traced the influence of his fiction on Hemingway and the Modernists broadly. In 1936, Hemingway listed "the good writers" in Green Hills of Africa as "Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain."

  Four stories have drawn the most sustained scholarly attention: "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and The Monster. Wells considered "The Open Boat" to be "beyond all question, the crown of all his work." The Stephen Crane House in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where he lived with siblings for nine years, now operates as a museum. Columbia University holds one of the largest collections of Crane materials in the country, including personal correspondence with Cora Taylor dating from 1895 to 1908 - letters that document a partnership cut short at exactly the point when it should have been deepening.