Stephen Crane
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Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist. The eighth surviving child of highly devout parents—his father was a Methodist minister and his mother was a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union—Crane was mostly raised by his older siblings in various parts of New Jersey. After attending several post-secondary institutions, including Claverack College, Lafayette College, and Syracuse University, he left schooling behind and traveled to New York to work as a reporter of slum life.
Crane's first novel was 1893's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which he followed with numerous short stories, poems, and accounts of war, all of which earned him praise but did not bring him the great acclaim he received for his 1895 Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage. Capitalizing on the novel's success, Crane became a highly paid war correspondent, covering conflicts in Greece and Cuba for newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. During the last year of his life he took refuge in the south of England, where he lived with his common-law wife, Cora Taylor, the former madam of a Jacksonville brothel. Plagued by exhaustion and ill health, Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in the Black Forest at the age of twenty-eight. Today he is considered one of the most innovative writers to emerge in the United States during the 1890s and one of the founders of Literary realism.[1]
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] Family legend maintains that Crane was descended from and named for a founder of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, who had come from England or Wales as early as 1665,[5] and a Revolutionary War patriot who had served two terms as a delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.[6] Crane would later write that his father, Dr. Crane, "was a great, fine, simple mind" who had written "numerous" tracts on theology.[7] His mother was an eloquent spokeswoman for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, but although she was a highly religious woman, Crane didn't believe that "she was as narrow as most of her friends or family."[8] Because of his parents' preoccupation, the young Stephen was raised primarily by his sister Agnes, who was fifteen years his senior.[6] In 1876, the family moved to Port Jervis, New York where Dr. Crane became the pastor of Drew Methodist Church, a position that he retained until his death.[6]
As a child, Stephen was often sickly and afflicted by constant colds.[9] His father wrote in his diary when the young boy was not yet two that his youngest son 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.[4] 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 do you spell O?"[10] In December 1879, Crane wrote his first surviving poem, which was entitled "I'd Rather Have –" about wanting a dog for Christmas.[11] Stephen was not regularly enrolled in school until January 1880,[12] but had no difficulty in completing two grades in six weeks. 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."[13]
Dr. Crane died on February 16, 1880 at the age of 60. He was mourned by some fourteen hundred people, more than double the size of his congregation.[14] After her husband's death, Mrs. Crane moved her family to Roseville, near Newark. After living with his brother William in Port Jervis for a few years, Stephen 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.[15] Within a couple of years, several more losses struck the Crane family. First, Townley's wife, Fannie, died of Bright's disease in 1883 after the deaths of the couple's two young children. Agnes then became ill and died on June 10, 1884 of cerebrospinal meningitis at the age of twenty-eight.[16]
[edit] Schooling
Crane wrote his first known story, "Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle", when he was fourteen[17] In the fall of 1885 he enrolled at Pennington Seminary, a ministry-focused coeducational boarding school seven miles north of Trenton,[18] where his father had been principal from 1849 to 1858.[6] 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."[19] Although she apparently recovered, the fourth 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.[20]
After two years, Crane left Pennington for Claverack College, a quasi-military school. He would later look back on this time at Claverack as "the happiest period of my life although I was not aware of it."[21] 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.[22] 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.[22] 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,[23] although he was greatly interested in the school's military training program and rose rapidly in the ranks of the student battalion.[24] Borland described his old classmate as "indeed physically attractive without being handsome," but he was aloof, reserved and not generally popular at Claverack.[25]
In the summer of 1888, Crane became his brother Townley's assistant in reporting about the New Jersey shore.[26] Crane's first signed publication was an article on the explorer Henry M. Stanley's famous quest to find the English missionary David Livingstone in Africa. It appeared in the February 1890 Claverack College Vidette.[27] 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 degree.[28] 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.[29] Crane infrequently attended classes and ended the semester with grades for only four of the seven courses he had taken.[30] After only one semester, Crane transferred to Syracuse University where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate in the College of Liberal Arts.[31] 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.[32]
Putting more emphasis on his writing, Crane began to experiment with tone and style while trying out different subjects.[33] A fictional story of his called "Great Bugs of Onondaga" ran simultaneously in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the New York Tribune.[34] 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.[35]
[edit] Post-education and full-time writing
From the beginning of his writing career, Crane's "chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably, so that all men (and some women) might read and understand. That to my mind is good writing."[36] Soon after leaving school, Crane showed two of his stories to Willis Fletcher Johnson who accepted them for publication in the Tribune's Sunday supplement. In February 1892, "Hunting Wild Dogs" and "The Last of the Mohicans", the first in a series of unsigned Sullivan County sketches and tales, appeared in print.[37] One of the most important events in Crane's life was his meeting Hamlin Garland during the summer of 1891. Garland was lecturing on American literature and the expressive arts in Avon, and on August 17 he gave a talk on novelist William Dean Howells, which Crane wrote up for the Tribune.[38]
In Fall 1891, Stephen moved into his brother Edmund's house in Lake View, a suburb of Paterson, New Jersey. He began living as a full-time writer, making trips to New York and wandering into tenements and exploring the Bowery's saloons, dance halls, brothels and flophouses.[39] Crane would later tell a friend, R. G. Vosburgh, that human nature here "was open and plain, with nothing hidden" and that is why he was drawn there.[39] The end of that year was filled not only with inspiration, but also with tragedy; on December 7, Crane's mother died at the age of sixty-four. The twenty-year old Crane appointed his brother Edmund as his guardian.[40]
Despite being "frail", "undernourished" and suffering from "a hacking cough", which did not prevent him from smoking cigarettes, Crane began a brief romance with a married woman named Lily Brandon Munroe.[41] Although Lily would later say in an interview that Crane "was not a handsome man", she nonetheless admired his "remarkable almond-shaped gray eyes."[42] He begged her to elope with him, but her family was opposed to the match because of Crane's lack of money and poor prospects, so she declined.[41]
[edit] Life in New York
In October 1892, Crane moved into a rooming house in Manhattan inhabited by a group of medical students.[43] It is not known when exactly Crane began to work on his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, or under what circumstances its composition was written. Crane himself claimed that he finished the novel just after his mother's death, so it may be the case that Crane completed the novel before arriving in New York, but rewrote and revised it there.[44] After experiencing difficulty finding a conventional publisher for his work, which was considered both coarse and profane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was published by a small printing shop on lower Sixth Avenue that usually printed medical books and religious tracts. The novel appeared under the pseudonym of "Johnston Smith" in late February or early March, 1893, and garnered little attention. Crane would later tell friend and artist Corwin Knapp Linson that the nom de plume was a mere chance and the "Commonest name I could think of. I had an editor friend named Johnson, and put in the "t", and no one could find me in the mob of Smiths."[45]
While working on his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane remained prolific, concentrating on publishing stories to stave off poverty; "An Experiment in Misery", based on Crane's experiences in the Bowery, was printed by the New York Press and at one point he was writing five or six poems a day.[47] In early 1894 he showed some of his poems, or "lines" as he called them, (including "God fashioned the ship of the world carefully") to Hamlin Garland, who said he read "some thirty in all" with "growing wonder."[48] Although Garland and William Dean Howells encouraged him to send his poetry out for publication, Crane's use of confessional free verse was too unconventional for most. After a brief wrangling between poet and publisher, Crane's first book of poems, The Black Riders and Other Lines, was picked up by Copeland & Day. He received a 10 percent royalty and the publisher assured him that the book would be in a form "more severely classic than any book ever yet issued in America."[49]
In the spring of 1894, Crane offered the finished manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage to McClure's Magazine, which had become the foremost magazine for Civil War literature. While McClure's delayed giving him an answer on his novel, they offered him an assignment writing about the Pennsylvania coal mines.[50] The story, "In the Depths of a Coal Mine", with pictures by Linson, was syndicated by McClure's in a number of newspapers under different headlines and heavily edited. Crane was reportedly disgusted by the cuts, asking Linson: "Why the hell did they send me up there then? Do they want the public to think the coal mines gilded ball-rooms with the miners eating ice-cream in boiled shirt-fronts?"[51]
After discovering that McClure could not afford to pay him, Crane took his war novel to Irving Bacheller of the Bacheller-Johnson Newspaper Syndicate, which agreed to publish The Red Badge of Courage in serial form. Between the third and the ninth of December 1894, The Red Badge of Courage began appearing in some half-dozen newspapers in the United States.[52] Although it was greatly cut for syndication, Bacheller attested to its causing a stir, saying "its quality [was] immediately felt and recognized."[53] The lead editorial in the Philadelphia Press of December 7 said that Crane "is a new name now and unknown, but everybody will be talking about him if he goes on as he has begun".[54]
[edit] Travels and fame
At the end of January 1895, Crane left on what he called "a very long and circuitous newspaper trip" to the west.[55] While writing feature articles for the Bacheller syndicate, he traveled to Saint Louis, Missouri, Nebraska (where he experienced a blizzard that he vividly described in his story The Blue Hotel), New Orleans, Galveston, Texas and then Mexico City.[56] Irving Bacheller would later state that he "sent Crane to Mexico for new color,"[57] which the author found in the form of the Mexican slum life. However, whereas he found the lower class in New York pitiful, he was impressed by the "superiority" of the Mexican peasants' contentment and "even refuse[d] to pity them."[58]
Returning to New York five months later, Crane joined the Lantern (alternately spelled "Lanthom" or "Lanthorne") Club organized by a group of young writers and journalists including Post Wheeler, Edward Marshall, Richard Watson Gilder, Irving Bacheller and Willis Brooks Hawkins.[59] The Club, which was located in a shanty on the roof of an old house on William Street near the Brooklyn Bridge, served as a watering hole of sorts and was made to look like a ship's cabin.[60] This is where Crane obtained his one square meal a day, although friends worried about Crane's "constant smoking, too much coffee, lack of food and poor teeth," as Nelson Greene put it.[61] Living in near poverty and greatly anticipating the publication of his books, Crane began work on two more novels: The Third Violet and George's Mother.
The Black Riders was published by Copeland & Day shortly before Crane's return to New York in May, but it received mostly criticism if not abuse for the poems' unusual style. In direct contrast to the reception of Crane's poetry, The Red Badge of Courage was welcomed with great acclaim and Crane was heralded for his insight and unique writing style. McClure Syndicate offered him a contract to write a series on Civil War battlefields, and because it was a wish of his to "visit the battlefield—which I was to describe—at the time of year when it was fought," Crane agreed to take the assignment.[62] Visiting battlefields in Northern Virginia, including Fredericksburg, he would later produce five more Civil War tales: "Three Miraculous Soldiers", "The Veteran", "An Indiana Campaign", "An Episode of War", and "The Little Regiment".[63]
[edit] Cora Crane, shipwreck and Greco-Turkish War
In Florida, Crane met Cora Stewart-Taylor (July 12, 1865 - Sep 4, 1910), the proprietress of a Jacksonville brothel, the Hotel de Dream. 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.
[edit] Spanish-American War and later work
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 The Black Rider and Other Lines, 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.
[edit] Death
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.[64]
[edit] Major works and reception
[edit] Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Often heralded as one of the first works of Naturalism literature, Crane's first novel is about a girl who "blossoms in a mud-puddle" and becomes a victim of circumstance.[65] In the winter of 1893, Crane brought the manuscript of Maggie to Richard Watson Gilder, who rejected it for publication in The Century Magazine. Crane decided to publish it privately, applying to the Library of Congress for copyright; the typewritten title page read simply, "A Girl of the Streets, / A Story of New York. / —By—/Stephen Crane." The name "Maggie" was added to the title later.[66]
The earliest known review of Crane's work, which appeared on March 13, 1894 in the Port Jervis Union, stated that "the pathos of [Maggie's] sad story will be deeply felt by all susceptible persons who read the book."[67] Despite this early praise, Crane became depressed and destitute from having spent $869 for 1,100 copies of a novel that did not sell; he ended up giving one hundred copies away. He would later remember "how I looked forward to publication and pictured the sensation I thought it would make. It fell flat. Nobody seemed to notice it or care for it... Poor Maggie! She was one of my first loves."[68]
[edit] The Red Badge of Courage
In March 1893, while spending hours lounging in Linson's studio while having his portrait painted, Crane became fascinated with issues of the Century published between 1884 and 1887.[69] Largely devoted to famous battles and military leaders from the Civil War, they were dryly written. Crane frustratingly said to Linson, "I wonder that some of those fellows don't tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they're as emotionless as rocks."[70] Crane returned to these magazines during subsequent visits to Linson's studio and eventually the idea of writing a war novel overtook him. He would later state that he "had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood" and had imagined "war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers."[71] This novel, which he believed would make him famous, would ultimately become The Red Badge of Courage.
From the beginning, Crane wished to show what it felt like to be in a war by writing "a psychological portrayal of fear."[72] Conceiving his story from the point of view of a young private who is at first filled with boyish dreams of the glory of war and then quickly becomes disillusioned by war's reality, Crane borrowed the private's surname, "Fleming", from his sister-in-law's maiden name. Crane would later tell Hamlin Garland that the first words and paragraphs came to him with "every word in place, every comma, every period fixed."[72] He worked mostly nights, writing from around midnight until four or five in the morning. Because he could not afford a typewriter, he wrote carefully in ink on legal-sized paper, seldom crossing through or interlining a word. If he did change something, he would rewrite the whole page.[73]
The Red Badge of Courage was published in September 1895 by the publishing house Appleton it became a great success. Appleton published two, possibly three, printings in 1895 and as many as eleven more in 1896.[74] There were those who criticized Crane's use of profanity and the story's graphicness, but for four months after its publication, the book was among the top six on various bestseller lists throughout the country.[75] The Detroit Free Press said that the novel "will give you so vivid a picture of the emotions and the horrors of the battlefield that you will pray your eyes may never look upon the reality."[76] H. L. Mencken, who was about fifteen at the time, remembered that the book arrived on the literary scene "like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky".[75] As in America, the book proved popular in England, as well; Joseph Conrad, a future friend of Crane's, would later write that Crane's work "detonated... with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive."[75] 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."[77]
[edit] The Black Riders and War is Kind
The Black Riders was published in May of 1895. Its first printing of five hundred copies was followed by criticism for the poetry's use of free verse; a piece in the Bookman called Crane "the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry"[78] and a commentator from the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean stated that "there is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page. Whitman's Leaves of Grass were luminous in comparison. Poetic lunacy would be a better name for the book."[79] In June the New York Tribune dismissed the book as "so much trash."[80] Crane, however, was pleased that the book was "making some stir".[81]
[edit] Legacy
[edit] Literary
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."[82]
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."
Stephen Crane's work was described by Wells as "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative."[83] Crane's peers, including Joseph Conrad and Henry James, as well as later writers such as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Willa Cather, have hailed Crane as one of the finest creative spirits of his time.[84]
[edit] Cultural
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Benfey, p. 3
- ^ Davis, p. 4
- ^ Stallman, p. 1
- ^ a b Davis, p. 10
- ^ Davis, p. 5
- ^ a b c d Wertheim, p. 1
- ^ Stallman, p. 6
- ^ Beer, p. 49
- ^ Stallman, p. 3
- ^ Berryman, p. 10
- ^ Wertheim, p. 21
- ^ Wertheim, p. 17
- ^ Stallman, p. 7
- ^ Davis, p. 15–16
- ^ Davis, p. 17
- ^ Davis, p. 19
- ^ Davis, p. 20
- ^ Davis, p. 21
- ^ Wertheim, p. 34
- ^ Davis, p. 22
- ^ Davis, p. 23
- ^ a b Davis, p. 24
- ^ Stallman, p. 19
- ^ Wertheim, p. 41
- ^ Davis, p. 28
- ^ Wertheim, p. 44
- ^ Stallman, p. 24
- ^ Wertheim, p. 51
- ^ Davis, p. 30
- ^ Davis, p. 31
- ^ Wertheim, p. 56
- ^ Wertheim, p. 59
- ^ Davis, p. 35
- ^ Wertheim, p. 61
- ^ Davis, p. 37
- ^ Stallman, p. 33
- ^ Wertheim, p. 71
- ^ Stallman, p. 34
- ^ a b Davis, p. 42
- ^ Davis, p. 43
- ^ a b Davis, p. 47
- ^ Wertheim, p. 74
- ^ Wertheim, p. 81
- ^ Benfey, p. 63
- ^ Wertheim, p. 84
- ^ Davis, p. 80
- ^ Davis, p. 82
- ^ Wertheim, p. 98
- ^ Davis, pp. 92-93
- ^ Davis, p. 87
- ^ Wertheim, p. 110
- ^ Davis, p. 94
- ^ Davis, p. 95
- ^ Wertheim, p. 117
- ^ Davis, p. 99
- ^ Wertheim, p. 121
- ^ Stallman, p. 141
- ^ Stallman, p. 144
- ^ Wertheim, p 132
- ^ Davis, p. 119
- ^ Davis, p. 120
- ^ Davis, p. 138
- ^ Davis, p. 143
- ^ Stephen Crane, Find A Grave. Accessed August 26, 2007.
- ^ Davis, pp. 55-56
- ^ Wertheim, p. 83
- ^ Wertheim, p. 85
- ^ Stallman, p. 70
- ^ Davis, p. 63
- ^ Wertheim, p. 89
- ^ Davis, p. 64
- ^ a b Davis, p. 65
- ^ Davis, p. 74
- ^ Wertheim, p. 141
- ^ a b c Davis, p. 129
- ^ Davis, p. 127
- ^ Social Studies Titles for Classroom Use, Random House. Accessed 2007-11-02.
- ^ Davis, p. 117
- ^ Wertheim, p. 132
- ^ Wertheim, p. 135
- ^ Wertheim, p. 134
- ^ Encyclopedia Americana, Volume 8, pp. 150-151 (1994)
- ^ Knapp, p. 1
- ^ Knapp, p. 2
[edit] Bibliography
- 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
- Knapp, Bettina L. Stephen Crane. New York: Ungar Publishing Co., 1987.
- Linson, Corwin K. My Stephen Crane. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958.
- 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
[edit] External links
