The first biography of Stephen Crane appeared in 1923. It was Thomas Beer’s Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters. Almost as soon as it was published, though, there was some doubt about the veracity of much of the book. Nevertheless, for many years it remained the only source of knowledge about Crane. However, as scholars became more interested in Stephen Crane, doubts about Beer’s biography increased. As a recent Crane scholar, Christopher Benfey, delicately put it: “In the writing of biography, invention is supposed to play a subsidiary role; in Beer’s Stephen Crane it was primary” (The Double Life of Stephen Crane, p. 8). Nevertheless, I include Beer’s biography in this bibliography and will let readers draw their own conclusions.

Beer, Thomas. Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

Benfey, Christopher. The Double Life of Stephen Crane. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. An interesting, unorthodox take on the life of the author. Along with Wertheim and Sorrentino, Benfey did much to discredit Beer’s biography.

Berryman, John. Stephen Crane: A Critical Biography. 1950. Revised edition. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. As the subtitle suggests, this book focuses on the works of Crane, placing them in literary and historical context.

Davis, Linda H. Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. This is the most recent and most comprehensive biography of Stephen Crane. Davis was relentless in ferreting out heretofore unknown facts about Crane, and the volume includes a number of photographs not previously published. Although a piece of serious scholarship, it is not dry but very readable and entertaining.

Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. An interesting study of fact and fiction about the nineteenth-century slum.

Linson, Corwin. My Stephen Crane. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958. An anecdote-filled memoir of Crane written by a close friend. Although written shortly after Crane’s death, it lay unpublished for fifty years.

Stallman, R. W Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: George Braziller, 1968. A good, solid piece of scholarship, Stallman published the first biography of Crane after Beer.

Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul Sorrentino. The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871-1900. American Author’s Log Series. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. A thorough investigation of Stephen Crane’s life, this book went far toward discrediting much of the Beer biography.

Bergon, Frank. Stephen Crane’s Artistry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: Sloane, 1950.

Cady, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. Revised edition. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Campbell, Donna M. Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997.

Dooley, Patrick K. The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

LaFrance, Marston. A Reading of Stephen Crane. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Nagel, James. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980.

Pizer, Donald, ed. Critical Essays on Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Solomon, Eric. Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.