Conrad’s lament may have been true at the time, but by the 1920s Crane’s works had been rediscovered and his reputation began an inexorable rise. Crane’s standing is now perhaps higher than it was when he was alive, and his contributions to American literature are confirmed and cemented in place. While he might never be as beloved as his contemporaries Mark Twain and Henry James, Crane is undoubtedly a pillar of nineteenth-century letters, far eclipsing popular contemporaries such as Francis Marion Crawford and William Dean Howells. There remains even now, a hundred years after his death, a whiff of danger and brimstone about Stephen Crane—though he would never claim the sentiment as his own, he may be said to be the first American literary figure to embody the ambitions of a later generation: Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse. While no one can attest to the last attribute, he exemplified the first two. As for the first—in just eleven short years Crane wrote novels, poems, short stories, and hundreds of pieces of reportage, including war correspondence—he even managed to find time to compile a book of songs. Had he written nothing more than the novels Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, and his masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage, his reputation would be secure. In addition, though, we have the racy facts of Crane’s life. He consorted with those considered the lowest of the low—Bowery bums, prostitutes, crooked cops, con men, men of violence—but he was equally at home with the great and good, and he was as well-learned as the members of high society. He was at ease in stately homes in England, fashionable spas, and the watering places of Mittel-Europa, as well as tenement slums and opium dens.

By the age of twenty-four he was famous enough to rise in an open court of law and announce himself as “Stephen Crane, the novelist,” confident, I would imagine, that everyone present knew who he was. It seems that they did. In any case, the judge asked for no further identification.

It would seem that the young Stephen Crane had the perfect springboard to push against when he decided to abandon the restrictive values of his straight-laced family and launch himself into the louche world of the demimonde. But in the manner of many of the offspring of religious parents, it seems that Crane never quite lost his sense of sin, his genetically imprinted fear of God. As one of his champions, Amy Levenell observed: “He disbelieved it and he hated it, but he could not free himself of it.”

Still, somehow he managed to tamp down the fires of self-damnation. He was not far into his teenage years when he made his first stabs at bohemianism. At a semi-military prep school in Claverack, New York, he was said to be given to outlandish dress, was “giftedly profane,” and made his contempt for authority quite obvious. Cadet Crane did not make it through a single year at the academy.

At Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, he began to read widely—not the required texts, but contemporary literature, particularly Flaubert and Tolstoy, authors still a generation away from the curriculum of a small American liberal-arts college. He repeatedly voiced profound opinions on these writers and on any other matters of the day. The brief experience at Lafayette College was succeeded by a stint at Syracuse University. It was at Syracuse that Crane developed a taste for the slums and the police courts—a curiosity that would stay with him throughout his brief life.

It was darkly bruited about at Syracuse that the colorful Stephen Crane was writing a scandalous novel about a prostitute. Legend has it that he started the book as early as sixteen years of age, but surely that would have been too young, even for someone as precocious as Stephen Crane. Most scholars of Crane’s works agree that he began the book at nineteen years of age, during his only semester at Syracuse University.

During his short professional life Crane traveled the world. He became an habitué of literary salons in Europe, covered wars in the Balkans, Mexico, and Cuba, and wandered the more remote corners of the western United States. But it was always in New York City that he found his métier; it was in the city that he was most at home. After Syracuse University, and a predictably brief stint on a suburban New Jersey newspaper, Crane gravitated to New York, the place that would shape his work, and, as a consequence, subsequent American letters.

Crane was determined to live in the city and to make his living with his pen. Living a bohemian, hand-to-mouth existence, he took to vanishing into the vast netherworld of the city, living among the whores, the drunks, the drug addicts, and the “b’hoys,” the Irish gangster swells of the Bowery. Emerging from this underworld, Crane would have enough material for a freelance newspaper piece as well as other material that would become Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Occasional newspaper work, a small but providential inheritance, and regular handouts from one of his brothers allowed Crane to cobble together a modest living—but it was Maggie on which he had pinned his hopes.

By 1892 Crane had finished writing Maggie. He approached the editor of Century Magazine, hoping his story would be serialized in the pages of that august publication. Almost immediately his hopes were dashed. The editor found the manuscript “cruel” and far too straightforward about the awful details of slum life. At the time there was no shortage of literature about the life of the underclass, but it was always couched in the safe terms of moral disapproval, sugar-coating the misery of the wretched, and suggesting that somehow the poor were responsible for their misery. Crane’s matter-of-fact presentation of life in the gutter was, the editor of the Century felt, too harsh for its middle- and upper-class readership.

Crane then began that dispiriting trek, so well known to first-time novelists, traveling from publisher to publisher only to have his manuscript rejected again and again. Many of the editors who read Maggie had the same opinion: While there was much to admire in the book, the squalor of the story, the appalling degradation of virtually all the characters, and the coarseness of the language were bound to outrage the “Mrs. Grundys” of the world (the fictional Mrs. Grundy, introduced in Thomas Morton’s 1798 play Speed the Plow, exemplifies the negative influence of conventional wisdom) and bring nothing but opprobrium down on the author and by extension his publisher.

Crane then came up with the idea of publishing his book under a pseudonym, and he chose the bland, almost forgettable name of “Johnston Smith.” “You see,” he explained, “I was going to wait until the world was pyrotechnic about Johnston Smith’s Maggie and then I was going to flop down like a trapeze performer from a wire, coming forward with all the grace of a consumptive hen, and say ‘I am he, friends’ ” (Stallman, Stephen Crane, p. 69; see “For Further Reading”).

That Crane set out to épater les bourgeois—outrage the middle class—there can be little doubt. However, the intentionally scandalous nature of the book still left him with the problem of finding a publisher—a problem that seemed insurmountable. Following rejection after rejection, Crane was forced to suffer the ignominy of publishing the work himself, paying a house best known for medical texts and religious tracts to print the first edition of Maggie. In 1893 he paid $869 for 1,100 copies of a cheap-looking yellow paperback edition of the book. Johnston Smith, however, had ceased to exist—Stephen Crane’s name appears on the title page. The publisher’s name appears nowhere. Even under the canopy of anonymity the publisher had insisted that the manuscript be bowdlerized to a degree. Some of the rougher language and more violent scenes were removed or toned down. But Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was still pretty strong meat for its day, and Crane now waited (one senses with a degree of gleeful anticipation) for the hue and cry, the fierce literary arguments, the denunciations from the pulpits of every denomination, that would propel Maggie to best-sellerdom and make the young man’s fortune.

Instead, silence. No newsstands or reputable bookshop would take the book on account of its incendiary nature—the only exception was Brentano’s, which took a dozen copies on consignment and returned ten. In desperation Crane took to giving away copies, dozens and dozens of them, and somehow, miraculously, the book found its way into the literary bloodstream, moving from one man of letters to another. When Crane’s spirits and fortunes were at their lowest ebb, he heard through a friend that his book had found its way into the hands of the well-respected author and critic William Dean Howells, who admired the book and announced that he would review it. The friend who gave Crane this welcome news was Curtis Brown, who would later become a prominent literary agent.

Brown remembers: “If Crane had been told that Howells had condemned the book he might have heaved a sigh. But instead, given the welcome news, he seemed dazed. He looked around like a man who did not know where he was. He gulped something down his throat, grinned like a woman in hysterics and then went off to take up his vocation again” (Stallman, p. 71).

But even with the enthusiastic support of the powerful Howells, the 1893 edition of Maggie could only be considered a failure. Just the same, the praise of a literary man whose opinion Crane respected seemed to strengthen him and was enough, it seems, to make him “take up his vocation again.”

This vocation led him to write his finest and best-known work, a novel that became an American classic: The Red Badge of Courage. Published in 1895 by the eminently respectable publishing house of Appleton and Company, the novel achieved huge sales and vast acclaim from the critics and reading public. Stephen Crane was suddenly thrust into the limelight he had sought, and had become, overnight, a literary figure to be reckoned with. He was also a rich young author, a guaranteed best-seller. As a result Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was reissued in 1896, and this time the manuscript was returned to its original state—all of the emendations and coy ellipses were removed. The Red Badge of Courage may have made Crane’s reputation, but Maggie was first in his heart.

But the slums imposed their own standards of morality. Mary, a drunken harridan, no stranger to the police courts, is counted a more “moral” character than her daughter Maggie. Mary, whose sins are myriad, cruel, even bestial, is a better person than her innocent daughter because Maggie evolves into a sinful fallen woman who has given up her chastity—a step she takes out of desperation, not desire, after constant cruelty and ultimately cruel betrayal.

By my count, Maggie—though she is the title character—has fewer than two dozen spoken lines in the entire book. She is passive and experiences few emotions beyond fear, grief, and anxiety. And yet it is her silence (while the rest of her world is a raucous cacophony of shrieks, oaths, curses, alarms, vendettas, and drunkenness), her tiny attempts to bring a little beauty into her drab world (the pathetic little lambrequin), and her attempts to flee her grim reality at the rough Bowery shows Pete takes her to that make her the most sympathetic character in the book. She is capable of love and yearns to be loved in return. The fallen woman, the reviled girl of the streets, is the moral center of the book.

One cannot help but imagine how far she actually fell. Apart from her brief cohabitation with Pete, Maggie is a most unenthusiastic, not to say inept, prostitute (unlike the accomplished, manipulative Nell) . As we follow her through the streets in the final hours of her miserable life, Maggie (who has ceased to be Maggie and has become, instead, simply “the girl”) has no luck in plying her trade—she is constantly rebuked or merely ignored. On the other hand, one man rejects her because she was neither “new, Parisian nor theatrical”—the “new” suggesting that she must have had enough customers in the past to be known to the visitors of the demimonde.

It seems that the only customer she can find who is remotely interested in her is her last. “... a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat.... He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey grizzled moustache from which beerdrops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions” (p. 66).

Who is this grotesque character? Is he merely Maggie’s last trick, a figure so repulsive that after she has serviced him she cannot conceive of falling any lower? Suicide becomes her last and only option. Or, perhaps she didn’t commit suicide at all but was murdered by this hideous character? Crane leaves this question unanswered.

The point is, Maggie dies, and we are shown the paltry effects of this tragic event. In the final chapter of the book, when Mary learns of her daughter’s death, she weeps copiously—mostly for herself, it seems—but the only real detail of Maggie’s short, brutish life she can recall has to do with a pair of shoes the girl wore as a child.

In the most ironic moment of the book Mary “forgives” her little daughter. But forgives her for what? Maggie should be alive to mete out the forgiveness. But she is not, and slum life goes on.

But the characters of Maggie are all of the same class and speak in the same way. The book is rife with slang, contractions, hundreds of misspellings (“dat” for that, “taut” for thought, etc.), and a torrent of apostrophes acting as stands-in for dropped letters. There is nothing refined about the story, from start to finish, so it would be hard to imagine the tale being told in any other manner. Even the most famous line in the book, as the narrative rises almost to the level of poetry, is composed with strict colloquial realism: Jimmie, “... on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: ‘Deh moon looks like hell, don’t it?’ ” (p. 22). One can’t imagine him or any other character in the novel expressing this heartfelt emotion, this momentary appreciation of beauty, in any other way.

The two novels are similar in other ways. Both books recount devastating falls from grace that, while heartbreaking, mean nothing to the world outside the fetid slums of New York’s Lower East Side. George and Maggie suffer tragedies that go unnoticed except by those directly affected by them.

However, George’s Mother is also quite different from Maggie, in tone if not in setting. In the Kelcey household there is none of the howling desperation that is a hallmark of life at the Johnsons, nor are we exposed to the unrelenting filth, chaos, destruction, or coruscating anger that characterizes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Also, the two main characters of George’s Mother, Mrs. Kelcey and her last-born (of six) and only surviving son, George, are decent, hardworking, salt-of-the-earth types. It is difficult to see how they deserve the tragedy that will eventually befall them. While such a tragic forecast is easy to make for the Johnson clan, it is almost unthinkable for the Kelceys.

It is interesting to compare the two mothers: Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Kelcey could not have been more different, but their stories are so similar. Mrs. Johnson drinks; Mrs. Kelcey is an active member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Johnson keeps a slovenly, disheveled household, filthy and strewn with debris; Mrs. Kelcey, to the degree that she can be in her mean lodging, is house-proud-wantonly destroying a piece of crockery or a piece of furniture would be completely alien to her, unfathomable. For Mrs. Johnson, smashing and destroying her few poor belongings seems to be something of a hobby, or at least her most powerful form of self-expression. It is all Mrs. Johnson can do to put a plate of potatoes on the family dining table, whereas Mrs. Kelcey is forever at the stove, cooking to satisfy her son, working over her pots and pans, wielding them “like weapons.”

Of course, the most telling difference between the two women comes at the end of the two books: When Mary Johnson learns of Maggie’s ignominious demise she cries, not for her “fallen” daughter but for herself, making a showy act of forgiveness. In Mrs. Kelcey’s case, when George falls into drunkenness she remains moral and upright. George doesn’t die—he takes to drink like many of the expendable workingmen in turn-of-the-century New York. But it is too much for Mrs. Kelcey to bear. It is a betrayal, and in that sense it represents the death of her sixth and final son. When George loses his job, Mrs. Kelcey takes to her bed and dies of a broken heart.

While Crane has stated that Mrs. Kelcey was an exaggeration of his mother’s own Woman’s Christian Temperance Union advocacy, the comparison ends there. There is little else to connect the well-spoken, educated, suburban preacher’s wife with the roughhewn, barely literate slum dweller Mrs. Kelcey—except that they both possessed a good heart and worried about their wild offspring.

Yet autobiographical connections do exist. Crane admired his mother while resisting her way of life and her manner of thinking. George, in his inchoate way, finds “correctness” in his mother’s morals but experiences her unwavering uprightness as “maddening” nonetheless.

George’s Mother may be another of Crane’s cautionary tales, but, as with Maggie, he is not shoving his own sense of morality down the throats of his readers. Rather, once again, he paints the picture and lets the viewers decide the morality of the tableau for themselves. Whose fault is it, he asks, if the downfall of the slum woman is prostitution and the great abyss awaiting the workingman is the saloon, where all he owns or holds precious is drowned in a pail of cheap beer?

It is no wonder then that the smug, self-satisfied, rather desiccated millionaires of their eponymous club considered themselves far above mere mortals, even if the mortals in question happen to be the upright, though plain-speaking, figures of the early days of the American republic: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington—all men of intelligence and action who valued political commitment and democratic ideals over wealth and personal power. Essentially turning this fundamental American morality and identity on its head, the millionaire families used their terrific fortunes to build huge “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island, buildings long on pretension but distinctly lacking in taste. Crane has endless fun with their absurd pretensions.

When a club servant (wearing a suit of livery that would have cost at least three times George’s yearly salary) enters this sacred space to announce some visitors, the millionaires show little more than a languid curiosity—never mind that the lackey has announced four of the greatest names in American history. It is of no consequence to the millionaires. When they further learn that these interlopers are Americans there is general consternation. “Don’t bring ‘em in here!” “Throw ’em out!” “Kill ’em!” (p. 132).

However, a cooler millionaire head prevails. Erroll Van Dyck Strathmore very calmly gives the orders. The newcomers are to be treated kindly, shown a cigarette end he happened to drop on the steps of the club, given a recipe for Mr. Jones-Jones Smith-Jones’s terrapin stew and a gallery ticket for a theatrical show.Then they are on no account to return to the Millionaire’s Club, because, it has been explained, the millionaires don’t know any Americans.

Crane’s was the time of the Grand Tour, when wealthy Americans looked to Europe for culture, when American money was traded for the titles of Old European nobility (more often than not a nobility fallen on hard times and looking for an infusion of that railroad or steel money that only an American fortune could provide). But more than that, the millionaires refuse to see themselves as Americans, even when confronted by men far more noble and “aristocratic” than they will ever be. The millionaires here have ceased to be Americans at all and have joined a new nationality—that of the plutocracy. In this neat little sketch Crane skewers these plutocrats, holding them up to a scorn and derision that they can only be said to have brought on themselves.

Stephen Crane and William Carroll were actually going to live it. Carroll hated every minute of slum living: He reported that while he lay cold and scared and uncomfortable in a nickel-a-night flophouse, Crane reveled in the entire experience. He liked the needle beer and the “free lunch” the cheap bars served—soup they called it, watery and bland, with “little floating suggestions of chicken” (p. 136). Crane’s account of a single night living in the rough is actually an amalgam of several such experiences—Carroll went once and one suspects that he had his fill of low living on that single occasion.

One gets the impression on reading “An Experiment in Luxury” that Crane liked to experiment with squalor. From the dismissive description of what was probably a very elegant brownstone house to that of the pathetic millionaire whose greatest pleasure in his delight-filled home comes from a simple kitten, Crane suggests in no uncertain terms that money is wasted on the wealthy. The journalistic standards of the nineteenth century were not as rigorous as they are today, and one cannot help but suspect that the “old friend” and “the youth” are two sides of Crane’s own character and that it is the “old friend” who most reflects his true opinion of the rich. The old friend’s jeremiad early on in the piece is the most telling. “I have been told all my life that millionaires have no fun, and I know that the poor are always assured that the millionaire is a very unhappy person” (pp. 145-146). Crane goes on to prove that millionaires and their offspring have every reason to be happy, but that they choose not to be. The youth gets plenty of advice on how to be miserable. “Be sure not to get off anything that resembles an original thought.... Be dreary and unspeakably commonplace.... Be damnable” (p. 150). But even for all the gloom of the millionaire’s home, Crane concludes correctly, “Wealth in a certain sense is liberty” (p. 154).

At the time of the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, numerous reviewers remarked that the battle scenes in the book were so true to life that they could only have been written by a grizzled veteran of the Civil War. Crane dismisses this story; he says that he had gotten most of his battleground ideas from watching football games. Even if this flippant remark is not true, Crane could not have fought in the Civil War; he was born six years after the cessation of hostilities. Clearly Crane was not above making up details. His exciting and tragic “When Everyone is Panic Stricken” is completely fictional, but that does not make it any less gripping. The story, which appeared in the New York Press, has a beautifully evoked “you are there” quality. The reader can smell the smoke, hear the comments of the passersby, and almost feel the anguish in the cry of the mother who has left her child in the flame-engulfed building: “My baby! My baby! My baby!” (p. 182).

The heroic policeman who plunges into the flame to rescue the child, the thundering hooves of the fire horses, the nonchalance of the firemen to whom one fire is much like another—these are all fig ments of Crane’s imagination, and yet it all rings true. Of course, Crane must have witnessed fires in his time, and given that the racing fire engines of the day were one of the great street scenes of New York City, he must have seen those as well. Still, it is all fiction. “The facts are: there was no fire at all, no baby, no hysterical mother, no brave policeman, no nothing, except Crane’s magnificent and, in this instance, impish imagination, and the great William Dean Howells was so taken in that he pronounced Crane’s article ‘a piece of realistic reporting.’ It is fiction, not reporting. Anyone who consults the New York newspapers around the date 25 November 1894 ‘will find nothing at all about any fire having taken place, much less anything about any policeman rescuing a child from a burning building’ ” (John S. Mayfield, American Book Collector: January 1957).

Edward Marshall, the Sunday editor of the New York Press, expressed himself years later about Crane’s tenement-house fire report: “It is one of the best things he or any other man ever did.” And while it is, the sketch is pure fiction. Crane later attempted to make amends for his deception: While covering the Spanish-American War, he filed a competing dispatch written by Marshall before his own, because Marshall was wounded and could not to do so himself.

Crane’s powers of invention find their way into a number of his New York City pieces. “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” “In a Park Row Restaurant,” and “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers” are most likely composites of sights and experiences that Crane witnessed over the years, thought rarely at one time nor with the companions he claimed to have been with. Of course, this does not make them any less valid. To modern readers, the title “Coney Island’s Failing Days” may suggest the decline of the great American playground. Quite the contrary. “Coney Island’s Failing Days” is an account of the closing of the summer resort, which will reopen in all its frankfurter-and-music-hall glory when the season begins the next year. “In a Park Row Restaurant” suggests nothing more than rush hour in a busy restaurant in a part of the city that was, and is, the locus of city business. Restaurants such as the one Crane describes are gone now, but such frenzied dining still goes on in many New York fast-food places. Lunchtime in the Wall Street area may not be quite as frenetic as the battle of Gettysburg, to which the dining experience is compared, but it is still hectic, even in the twenty-first century.

In the interests of truthfulness, Crane may have played fast and loose with the facts, but four of the pieces included in this edition present details of New York life largely as they were, without embellishment. In “Opium’s Varied Dreams” he presents a methodical, almost clinical study of drug addicts in the New York City of his time. His writing here is almost as sympathetic as his slum reportage; he simply states the facts and lets readers draw their own conclusions. There is no doubt that Crane’s observations were intended, in part, to titillate his readers, but one can also discern a certain sympathy for the drug user.

In the 1880s the United States was in the grip of bicycle mania—and New York City was no exception. “New York’s Bicycle Speedway” is Crane’s take on the craze; it notes that wheelmen and wheelwomen, as he called the cyclists, had taken over a number of thoroughfares in the city, including part of Broadway, the area around City Hall, but in particular an extension of Eighth Avenue, now Central Park West, from One Hundred and Tenth Street to Columbus Circle. The bicycle craze wreaked havoc with the already chaotic traffic in the city. The piece is a lighthearted look at a trend that did not last long; it is an interesting snapshot of the city during one brief moment.

It is said that a police precinct captain responsible for the Bowery heard that he was being transferred uptown, to the Tenderloin, an area on the West Side of Manhattan from roughly Twenty-third Street to Columbus Circle that at the time was rife with corruption. Referring to the bribes he had received downtown, he is known to have said, “All these years I’ve been living on chuck steak. Now I’m gonna get me some tenderloin.” Crane’s series of articles “In the Tenderloin” takes the reader on an anecdotal tour of this area, which had a high concentration of bordellos, music halls, bars, and clip joints. The area, known as Satan’s Circus, was a natural stomping ground for Crane, who knew it well.

Far distant from the Tenderloin was Minetta Lane, a horseshoeshaped side street off Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. In the newspaper headline that ran with the piece titled “Stephen Crane and Minetta Lane,” Crane calls this tiny street “one of Gotham’s most notorious thoroughfares.... Where the inhabitants have been famous for evil deeds, where the burglar and the shoplifter and the murderer live side by side” (p. 217). Again, Crane seems to be quite at home in this den of iniquity and on first-name terms with many of the most notorious burglars, shoplifters, and murderers.

Apart from having been the author The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane was probably best known not for something he had written, but for an incident that occurred during his life. The Dora Clark/Stephen Crane episode tells us a great deal about Crane’s character. It was a simple affair: While in the Tenderloin one night in September 1886, Crane observed a young woman (probably a prostitute) named Dora Clark being arrested by a policeman named Charles Becker. Becker claimed that he had seen Clark solicit two men on a Tenderloin street. Because he knew this not to be the case, Crane called the arrest “an outrage” and personally intervened, making the case a cause célèbre. That a man of his stature should step forward to defend a woman of such dubious reputation was just the sort of thing Crane would do. With intense press coverage and imputations against Crane’s own character, he insisted on defending Dora Clark to the fullest degree. The case consumed the nation and briefly knocked the presidential election off the front pages of the newspapers from Maine to California. Ultimately he and Clark were vindicated and Becker reprimanded from the bench. The whole incident suggests Crane’s career in a nutshell: His fascination with low life, his general sense of honor, and his tireless defense of the downtrodden.