Mental calculations so unflattering and so familiar had rarely been made so visible in fiction before, except, from time to time, in villains. Fittingly, it has been hard for biographers to figure out who this chronicler of the undermined self really was. Years of debunking seem to have left him reluctant to paint in bold strokes, however, and his book is a collection of facts rather than an interpretation.
Still, his book offers the most comprehensive picture to date, and it enables us to piece together a new Stephen Crane: a figure as driven to prove his manhood as Jack London; as plaintive about his broken faith as Herman Melville; and as ironic about his personal self, and as recklessly disinclined to take conventional sexual morals seriously, as Oscar Wilde. Crane was born in Newark in , into religion and conflict. His mother came from a family of Methodist ministers. His mother gave temperance lectures: after cracking the white of an egg into a glass, she showed the audience how a squirt of alcohol curdled it.
The youngest of fourteen siblings, only nine of whom survived infancy, Crane did not have an easy childhood. The family moved often, and his father died, of what seems to have been a heart attack, in But he was precocious in his pursuit of pleasure. By the time he was four, he was already reading novels. When he was six, a friend watched in admiration as he smoked a cigarette on the way to a temperance lecture and drank a beer at a fair the next day. He was sent to a Methodist boarding school, but he dreamed of a career in the military, and when, in a dispute over a hazing incident, a teacher called him a liar, he dropped out.
His mother agreed to send him to a semi-military academy instead. He loved it. He enrolled at Lafayette College, in order to study mining engineering. It was a practical idea, but he failed five of his seven classes. In writing, he got a zero. Crane, what are you in this university for? He admitted to an interest in journalism. He began to write for a college paper, and an old friend of the family hired him as the Syracuse correspondent for the Tribune.
Crane might have gleaned some of his urban details from literature—New Yorkers had been writing about waifs and prostitutes for half a century—but he no doubt came by many of them firsthand. He explored New York in forays during the next two years, while living with his brothers upstate. In October, , he moved to the city, renting a room in a boarding house on Avenue A with a fraternity brother, and revised the manuscript extensively.
Sometimes he wrote just a polished phrase on a scrap of paper, only afterward figuring out where to lodge it. He chose yellow covers and the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and his friends threw him a raucous party.
He had to borrow a pair of pants from a friend in order to look presentable. To advertise the book, Crane hired four men to read it as conspicuously as possible on the elevated train, which, unfortunately, had little effect on sales.
He fell in with a bohemian circle of artists, writers, and medical students, and an illustrator named Corwin K. He switched to Syracuse University, but failed to graduate there as well.
Crane managed to squeeze a lot of experiences into his brief life of less than three decades. When he was sixteen, he wrote and privately printed for limited circulation a novel about a prostitute, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.
After that he worked at various newspaper jobs in New York City, until one day in at the studio of an artist friend, he mentioned he had been reading a war story in a magazine and told his friend he could write a better one himself.
Crane, who had never done military service and knew nothing about the American Civil War, spent three days reading every book about the war he could find in the public library. Then he wrote The Red Badge of Courage , which was rejected by every book publisher he sent it to and finally was serialized in a magazine, in condensed form, for which Crane was paid ninety dollars.
Critics later hailed the book as a masterpiece, speculating that its author must be a veteran soldier. Crane went to Cuba to cover the uprising against the Spanish in , but was shipwrecked. He was originally reported dead, but survived by swimming to shore. Later, as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish War, Crane would witness the din of battle with his own eyes. Stephen Crane spent time reporting on the Tenderloin, a section of midtown Manhattan known for its brothels, transgressive amusements, and illicit economy.
One day, he was helping a prostitute named Dora Clark onto a cable car when a policeman arrested her and her friend for soliciting. Crane thought it was wrong to arrest her for doing nothing wrong, and to save her Crane claimed to be her husband.
Clark was arrested anyway, and Crane was deterred by police from meddling in the case, but appeared nonetheless to testify the next morning. The author would spend the last three years of his life traveling and writing, making visits to Cuba and England and Greece, before dying in a German sanatorium in A blog about books.
Rare books. Nov 1, He grew up fast For a writer to become a major novelist by his early 20s Crane was 23 when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage , it is not so surprising that the milestones of life came to him fast. He had an exciting start Crane wrote the first draft of his debut novel, Maggie , while at the University of Syracuse, which he entered with only the vague idea of wanting to become a journalist he experimented with mining engineering, but failed the classes.
He had a marketing mind To promote his yellow-covered, self-published debut, Crane hired four men to read the book conspicuously along the elevated train along the Bowery. He stuck his neck out for the marginalized, and suffered the consequences Stephen Crane spent time reporting on the Tenderloin, a section of midtown Manhattan known for its brothels, transgressive amusements, and illicit economy.
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