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Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane, 1900
Pseudonym:	Johnston Smith
Born	November 1, 1871(1871-11-01) Newark, NJ, USA
Died	June 5, 1900(1900-06-05) Badenweiler, Germany
Occupation	novelist, poet and journalist
Nationality	American
Writing period	Naturalism
Debut works	Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

For the U.S. Continental Congress delegate, see Stephen Crane (delegate).

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, best known for the novel Red Badge of Courage. That work introduced the reading world to Crane's striking prose, a mix of impressionism, naturalism and symbolism. He died at age 28 in Badenweiler, Baden, Germany.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Schooling 1.3 Later life 2 Literary reception, influence and legacy 3 Works 3.1 Novels 3.2 Poetry 3.3 Short Story Collections 3.4 Non-fiction 4 In popular culture 5 References 6 Bibliography 7 External links

Stephen Crane was born November 1, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey to Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, a Methodist minister, and Mary Helen Peck Crane, a clergyman's daughter and member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.^[1] He was the fourteenth and last child born to the couple; the forty-five year old Mary Crane had lost her four previous children, who each died within one year of birth.^[2] Nicknamed "Stevie" by the family, he joined eight surviving brothers and sisters—Mary Helen, George Peck, Jonathan Townley, William Howe, Agnes Elizabeth, Edmund Byran, Wilbur Fiske, and Luther.^[3] Family legend maintains that Crane was descended from and named for a founder of Elizabethtown, who had come from England or Wales as early as 1665,^[4] and a Revolutionary War patriot who had served two terms as a delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.^[5] Crane would later write that his father, Dr. Crane, "was a great, fine, simple mind" who had written "numerous" tracts on theology. His mother devoted her life to being an eloquent spokeswoman for the Temperance movement.^[6] Because of his parents' preoccupation, the young Stephen was raised primarily by his sister Agnes, who was fifteen years his senior.^[5]

The family moved to Bloomington in 1874 and then Paterson in 1876, where Dr. Crane became pastor of the Cross Street Church. In 1876, Dr. Crane became the pastor of Drew Methodist Church in Port Jervis, New York, which he would retain until his death.^[5] As a child, Stephen was often sickly and afflicted by constant colds.^[7] His father would write in his diary when the young boy was not yet two that he became "so sick that we are anxious about him." Despite his fragile nature, Crane was a precocious child who taught himself to read before the age of four and was attempting to write by three.^[3] His first known inquiry, recorded by his father, dealt with writing; at the age of three, while imitating his brother Townley's writing, he asked his mother, "how to you spell O?"^[8] In December 1879, Crane wrote his first surviving poem, which was entitled "I'd Rather Have –" about wanting a dog for Christmas.^[9] Stephen was not regularly enrolled in school until January 1880,^[10] but had no difficulty in completing two grades in six weeks. Later recalling this feat, he wrote that it "sounds like the lie of a fond mother at a teaparty, but I do remember that I got ahead very fast and that father was very pleased with me."^[11]

Dr. Crane died on February 16, 1880 at the age of sixty after being suddenly seized by chest pains. He was mourned by some fourteen hundred people, more than double the size of his congregation.^[12] After her husband's death, Mrs. Crane moved her family to Roseville, near Newark. After being placed in the care of his oldest brother Edmund for a while, Stephen went to live with his brother William in Port Jervis for a few years. He and his sister Helen then moved to Asbury Park to be with their brother Townley and his wife. Townley was a newspaperman, heading the Long Branch department of both the New York Tribune and the Associated Press as well as serving as the editor of the Asbury Park Shore Press. Agnes took a position at Asbury Park's intermediate school and moved in with Helen to care for the young Stephen.^[13] Within a couple years, numerous losses struck the Crane family. First, Townley's wife, Fannie, died of Bright's disease on November 26, 1883 after the deaths of the couple's two young children. Agnes then became ill and after having to resign her teaching job, died on June 10, 1884 of cerebrospinal meningitis at the age of twenty-eight.^[14]

A year after Agnes' death, when Stephen was fourteen, he wrote his first known story, "Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle."^[15] In the fall of 1885 he enrolled at Pennington Seminary, a ministry-focused coeducational boarding school seven miles north of Trenton,^[16] where his father had been principal from 1849 to 1858.^[5] Soon after her youngest son left for school, Mrs. Crane began suffering what the Asbury Park Shore Press reported as "a temporary aberration of the mind."^[17] Although she apparently recovered, the third death in Stephen's immediate family in six years came when the twenty-three year old Luther died while falling in front of an oncoming train while working as a flagman for the Erie Railroad.^[18]

After two years of study, Stephen left Pennington and his mother wrote to the principal of Claverack College, was a quasi-military school, on behalf of her son. Crane would later look back on this time at Claverack as "the happiest period of my life although I was not aware of it.^[19] A classmate would later remember him as a highly literate but erratic student, lucky to pass examinations in math and science, and yet "far in advance of his fellow students in his knowledge of History and Literature," his favorite subjects.^[20] He took to signing his name "Stephen T. Crane" because, not having a middle name like the other students, he tried "to win recognition as a regular fellow," said classmate Armistead "Tommie" Borland.^[20] Crane was seen as friendly, but also moody and rebellious. He was not adverse to skipping class in order to play baseball, in which he starred as catcher,^[21] although he was greatly interested in the school's military training program and rose rapidly in the ranks of the student battalion.^[22] Borland described his old classmate as "indeed physically attractive without being handsome," but he was aloof, reserved and not generally popular at Claverack.^[23]

Stephen became his brother Townley's assistant in reporting about the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1888.^[24] Crane's first signed publication was an article on the explorer Henry M. Stanley's famous quest to find the famous English missionary David Livingstone in Africa. It appeared in Claverack's Vidette for February 1890.^[25] Within a few months, however, Crane was persuaded by his family to forgo a military career and transfer to Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania in order to pursue a mining engineering program.^[26] He registered at Lafayette on September 12 and promptly became involved in extracurricular activities; he took up baseball once more and joined the largest fraternity, Delta Upsilon, and two rival groups: the Washington Literary Society and the Franklin Literary Society.^[27] Again neglecting his scholastic duties, Crane infrequently attended classes and ended the semester with grades for only four of the seven courses he had taken, including a 60 in algebra, which was the third lowest grade in the class.^[28] After only one semester, Crane transferred to Syracuse University where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate in the College of Liberal Arts.^[29] He roomed in the Delta Upsilon fraternity house and joined the baseball team. He only attended one class (English Literature) during the middle trimester, and although he took no course in the third trimester, he remained in residence.^[30]

Putting more emphasis on his writing, Crane began to experiment with tone and style while trying out different subjects.^[31] A fictional story of his called "Great Bugs of Onondaga" ran simultaneously in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the New York Tribune.^[32] Telling a classmate that "College is a waste of time," Crane decided to become a newspaper reporter. Shortly after attending a Delta Upsilon chapter meeting on June 12, 1891, Crane left college for good.^[33]

After his mother's death Crane moved to New York City, where he lived a bohemian life working as a free-lance writer and journalist. He wrote articles for, among others, the New York Tribune.

Crane used his unsparing observations of the life of the Bowery poor in short stories and his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a milestone in realism and the early development of literary naturalism. He published the book with money borrowed from his brother and released it under the pseudonym "Johnston Smith." It was not a commercial success or favored by most critics of the time, though it won the admiration of Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells.

Maggie for its few American readers, and The Red Badge of Courage (1895) for much of the international reading public, introduced Crane's innovative writing style. The Red Badge received intense international acclaim, while Maggie, re-issued in 1896, found a much less welcoming reception.^[34]

Now a well-paid war correspondent, Crane was shipwrecked in route to Cuba in early 1897. He and a small party of passengers spent 30 hours adrift off the coast of Florida, an experience which Crane later transformed into his short story masterpiece, The Open Boat (1898). "None of them knew the color of the sky," is the story's much lauded first sentence.

In Florida Crane met Cora Stewart-Taylor (July 12, 1865 - Sep 4, 1910), the proprietress of a Jacksonville brothel, the Hotel de Dream. They married in 1897 or 1898, although Cora had not divorced her first husband. Taylor was also a writer and she and Crane worked together as war correspondents during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. This experience was the basis for his novel Active Service (1899), whose main character is a journalist covering that war.

Escaping his and Cora's past and leaving behind the abuse and ridicule the American press had bestowed upon some of Crane's work, in particular his first collection of poetry, The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895), Crane and Cora moved to England. There Crane was already lionized and The Red Badge of Courage greatly admired. In 1897 the couple settled in Brede Place, an old estate in Sussex. Crane befriended writers Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Henry James.

After a fruitless attempt to improve his health in Greece, Crane died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey.^[35]

Crane is noted for his early employment of naturalism, a literary style in which characters face realistically portrayed and often bleak circumstances, but Crane emphasized impressionistic imagery and biblical symbolism rather than graphic realism. Crane's realism, writes William Peden, "is often more impressionistic than photographic; his interest in psychological probing, his innovations in technique and style, and his use of imagery, paradox and symbolism give much of his best work a romantic rather than a naturalistic quality. Both realism and symbolism, the two major directions of modern fiction, have their American beginnings in Crane's work."^[36]

H.G. Wells adds that the painterly quality of Crane's prose, "the great influence of the studio," should not be ignored: "...in the persistent selection of the essential elements of an impression, in the ruthless exclusion of mere information, in the direct vigor with which the selected points are made, there is Whistler even more than there is Tolstoi in The Red Badge of Courage." Wells then selects, "almost haphazard," the following lines from that work to illustrate his point:

"At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. ...From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects."

The Red Badge of Courage, about a young soldier's initiation into the horrors and ironies of war set during the American Civil War, won international acclaim for its vividness and psychological depth. Crane had never experienced battle, but had read and conducted interviews with a number of veterans, some of whom may have suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. Ernest Hemingway, who would take up several of Crane's settings and themes, called the book an American classic, and Alfred Kazin writes that The Red Badge of Courage "has long been considered the first great ‘modern’ novel of war by an American—the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism."^[37]

Crane's poetry, which he called 'lines' rather than poems, was also strikingly new in its minimalist meter and rhyme. It employed symbolic imagery in order to communicate at times heavy-handed irony and paradox.

In Stephen Crane. From an English Standpoint (1900), written shortly after Crane's death, Wells sums up Crane the literary figure as "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative—beginning, as a growing mind needs begin, with the record of impressions, a record of a vigor and intensity beyond all precedent."^[34]

• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
• The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
• George's Mother (1896)
• The Third Violet (1897)
• Active Service (1899)

• The Black Riders (1895)
• War is Kind (1899)

• The Little Regiment (1896)
• The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898)
• The Monster and Other Stories (1899)
• Whilomville Stories (1900)
• Wounds in the Rain (1900)

• Great Battles of the World (1901)

The best known film of The Red Badge of Courage was directed by John Huston and released in 1951. [2]

An image of Crane is barely visible on the The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) album cover. [3]

Crane is mentioned in the novel Changing Places (1975), one of British novelist David Lodge's campus novels.

Crane was played by Adam Storke in the 1997 made-for-TV film Rough Riders.

One of Crane's poems was the basis for the 2001 film, The Dark Riders.

In 2007 Edmund White published the novel Hotel de Dream, based on the probably apocryphal story (from the memoirs of a Crane friend, James Gibbons Huneker) that Crane had written and then destroyed a 40-page novella fragment on a boy prostitute.^[38]

• Beer, Thomas. Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters. New York: Knopf, 1972. ISBN 0374905193
• Benfey, Christopher. The Double Life of Stephen Crane. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0394568648
• Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: Meridian, 1962.
• Davis, Linda H. Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephan Crane. New York: Mifflin, 1998. ISBN 0899199348
• Stallman, R. W. Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: Braziller, Inc., 1968.
• Wertheim, Stanley and Paul Sorrentino. The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871-1900. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1994. ISBN 0816172927

• Works by Stephen Crane at Project Gutenberg
• The Red Badge of Courage Site
• The Stephen Crane Society
• Stephen Crane's Gravesite