STEPHEN CRANE
Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, the
fourteenth and last child of the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane
and Mary Helen Peck, a Methodist missionary. Stephen’s interest in
war and the military developed early, and he convinced his mother
to enroll him in the Hudson River Institute, a semi-military school
in upstate New York. On the advice of a professor who urged him to
pursue a more practical career than the army, Stephen transferred
to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, to study mining engineering;
however, he seldom attended class and failed a theme writing course
because of poor attendance. His formal education ended after one
semester at Syracuse University, where he was known on campus for
his baseball skills. Despite his unimpressive academic performance,
he wrote regularly while he was a student.
Stephen Crane became a prolific writer—of
journalism and novels, short stories and poetry. By age
twenty-three he had completed two major novels marked by an
impressionism and a psychological realism that anticipated the “new
fiction” of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William
Faulkner. His writing of fiction is informed by the keen, precise
observation that also made him a journalist; for Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets (1893), he shadowed a New York prostitute for
weeks. Crane was born after the Civil War, and he relied on
secondary sources and his own intuition and emotional insights in
creating The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the story of a
young recruit’s experiences during one key battle. The book is
often cited as the first modern novel.
While on assignment to cover the Cuban-Spanish
conflict that preceded the Spanish-American War, Crane met his
life-long companion, Cora Stewart, a well-read daughter of old
money who owned a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida. Crane and
Stewart later lived in England, where they socialized with Henry
James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, who admired Crane’s
unique writing style. The young American continued to publish
novels, stories, and articles for journals, which solidified his
reputation.
Illness cut Crane’s life short. In 1899, in
Badenweiler, Germany, he collapsed with severe hemorrhaging of the
lungs brought on by tuberculosis and malaria. He died in a
sanitarium on June 5, 1900, five months before his twenty-ninth
birthday.
In his short but brilliant career, Stephen Crane
produced six novels, two collections of poetry, and more than one
hundred stories, which were compiled in a ten-volume edition
published by the University Press of Virginia (1969-1976). He is
remembered as a pioneering writer who anticipated the styles that
modernized American literature in the 1920s.