STEPHEN CRANE - BIOGRAPHY

Stephen Crane
1871-1900

Stephen Crane’s father was a Methodist preacher in Newark, New jersey, Crane's birth¬place. His mother was a social leader and temperance crusader. Both parents exhibited a characteristic nineteenth-century faith in the benevolence of God, in the existence of free will, and in the significance of man in the universe—ideas that their son, in the course of his short and tempestuous life, would attack with humor and savage irony.

Crane had originally hoped to be a soldier, but in 1890, after two and a half years at a military prep school in New York, he entered Lafayette College to study mining-engineering. After one term he left Lafayette and transferred to Syracuse University. There he devoted most of his efforts to playing varsity baseball, working as a local correspondent for the New York Tribune, and writing his first short stories. After less than a year at Syracuse, Crane withdrew and moved to New York City. There he mingled with Bohemian art students living in tenements, and. he struggled to earn his way as a freelance journalist contributing items to New York newspapers.
Crane's observation of life on New York's Bowery and his reading of exposés of New York slum life provided him with much of the background material for his first novel, “Maggie, A Girl of the Streets” (1893). It was the first naturalistic novel written by an American, and its stark description of squalor and immorality was so shocking for its time that Crane, unable to find an interested publisher, was obliged to publish the novel at his own expense. In 1895, he published his first book of poems, The Black Riders, which were short, caustic, free-verse parables of the absurdity of the human condition. In the same year “The Red Badge of Courage” was published in book form, bringing Crane international acclaim.

His travels as a reporter for a newspaper syndicate took him through the American West, to Mexico, and to Florida where he joined in the unsuccessful gun-running expedition to Cuba that led to his most famous short story, "The Open Boat." In 1897, Crane settled in England, became friends with Joseph Conrad and Henry James, and labored mightily at writing fiction and doing editorial hackwork in an effort to pay for his extravagant style of living. The next year, in spite of ill health, Crane went to Cuba as a war correspondent reporting on the Spanish-American War for the New York World. When he returned to England early in 1899 he was suffering from tuberculosis, and in June 1900, after traveling to a German sanitarium to seek a cure, Crane died. He was twenty-eight.
His early writing had been burlesques and satires, expressions of ironic detachment. Crane had announced that his ambition as a writer was to achieve personal honesty—to deflate romantic idealism, and portray men battered and alone in a hostile world. He has been viewed as an uncompromising determinist, a literary naturalist who saw human beings as wholly controlled by their environment and heredity. At the same time he has been seen as a Christian symbolist expressing faith in the ultimate understanding and redemption of people. Crane was a pioneer of a new literary realism that was impressionistic in its vivid imagery, in its characterizations, and in its narrative style. And he was a master of irony, scrutinizing the persistent illusions of people and the disparity between their buoyant expectations and their doom.

FURTHER READING:
“The Works of Stephen Crane”, 12 vols., ed. W. Follett, 1925-1927, 1963
“The Works of Stephen Crane”, 10 vols., ed. F. Bowers, 1969-1975
“The Correspondence of Stephen Crane”, 2 vols., e0. S. Wertheim and P. Sorrentino, 1988
J. Berryman, “Stephen Crane”, 1950, 1962, 1980
D. Hoffman, “The Poetry of Stephen Crane”, 1957
E. Cady, “Stephen Crane”, 1962, 1980
E. Solomon, “Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism”, 1966
R. Stallman, “Stephen Crane”, 1968
D. Gibson, “The Fiction of Stephen Crane”, 1968
M. LaFrance, “A Reading of Stephen Crane”, 1971
“Stephen Crane in Transition: Centenary Essays”, ed. J. Katz, 1972
“Stephen Crane's Carrer”, ed. T. Gullason, 1973
F. Bergon; “Stephen Crane's Artistry”, 1975
J. Nagel, “Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism”, 1980
C. Wolford, “The Anger of Stephen Crane”, 1983
J. Colvert, “Stephen Crane”, 1984
M. Fried, “Realism, Writing, Disfiguration”, 1987
“Stephen Crane”, ed. H. Bloom, 1987
Stephen Crane's “The Red Badge of Courage”, ed. H. Bloom, 1987
B. Knapp, “Stephen Crane”, 1987
C. Wolford, “Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction”, 1989
D. Halliburton, “The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane”, 1989
C. Benfey, “The Double Life of Stephen Crane”, 1992
S. Wertheim and Sorrentino, “The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane”, 1993
P. Dooley, “The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane”, 1993
“Recovering Crane: Essays on a Poet”, ed. R. Kelly and A. Lathrop, 1993
M. Robertson, Stephen Crane: “Journalism and the Making of Modern American Literature”, 1997
L. Davis, “Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane”, 1998
R. Morris, “Stephen Crane: A Biography”, 2005

TEXTS:
The Poems of Stephen Crane, ed. J. Katz, 1966
"The Open Boat," The Works of Stephen Crane, Vol. V, Tales of Adventure, ed. E Bowers, 1970
"The Blue Hotel," The Monster and Other Stories, 1899