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Stephen Crane |
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Although he was born more than six years after the end of the American Civil War, Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage depicted that war so vividly, and rendered the fears of men in battle so intensely, that many veterans who read the book were convinced that he was one of them. In a career of less than ten years, Crane produced a body of work that, in its striking and concise phrasing and its unflinching confrontation of smugness and hypocrisy, helped set the course of American fiction and poetry in the twentieth century.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871, Stephen Crane was his parents' fourteenth (and last) child. His father, Dr. Jonathan Townley Crane, was a Methodist minister, as were his maternal grandfather and other relatives on both sides of his family. Dr. Crane's successive ecclesiastical appointments led the family to move in 1876 to Paterson, New Jersey, and in 1878 to Port Jervis, a town in upstate New York that, with its surrounding countryside, would become the setting for a number of Crane's works, including Whilomville Stories, the novel The Third Violet, and one of his greatest short stories, "The Monster." After Dr. Crane's death in 1880, his widow moved the family to Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Crane attended the Hudson River Institute in Claverack, New York, from 1888 to 1890, where he was taught history by John B. Van Petten, who had been an officer in the Civil War. In September 1890, he enrolled at Lafayette College to study mining engineering, but left without completing his first semester. He entered Syracuse University in January 1891, where he showed more interest in catching for the varsity baseball team than in his studies. In his single semester at Syracuse, he passed only one course of six—English literature, for which he received an A. He had also begun to write for the New York Tribune, and even though he was to lose that position the following year for writing a satirical account of a parade by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, journalism would remain one of his principal means of support and avenues to fame for the rest of his brief life.
Crane later maintained that he wrote his first major work of fiction, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in two days just before Christmas of 1891. He borrowed money from one of his brothers to have it printed, since he was unable to publish it commercially because of its bleak and uncompromising presentation of life in the slums of New York City: the title character is forced to turn to prostitution after being self-righteously rejected by everyone she has loved and trusted. The book appeared early in 1893 under the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and, while very few copies were sold, it won favorable attention from the influential novelists Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells.
Also in early 1893, Crane wrote a first version of what would become The Red Badge of Courage. This novel, his masterpiece, was published in 1895 in both the United States, where it became a bestseller, and England, where it also attracted a great deal of positive notice. In vivid and impressionistic prose, studded with the kinds of striking similes that were a hallmark of Crane's style, the novel relates the experiences of "the youth" Henry Fleming and his comrades as they test themselves on the field of battle. Also in 1895 appeared The Black Riders, the first of Crane's two collections of free verse. These often fable-like little poems, with their stripped-down lines and stark phrasing concentrated on the rendering of a single effect, were to influence the Imagist movement in Anglo-American poetry in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Crane was himself a dashing figure, whose life was often as much of a story as anything that came from his pen. One night in September 1896, he interviewed several chorus girls for a series of articles about New York City. After leaving a restaurant at two in the morning, Crane and his party were stopped by a policeman named Charles Becker, who two decades later would be the principal figure in a much more notorious affair. Becker arrested Dora Clark, one of the women with Crane, on a charge of soliciting. Crane vigorously asserted her innocence in the matter and appeared in court to denounce the arresting officer. The incident caused a sensation in the then-lively world of New York City newspapers, with Crane exalted (largely by his own paper) as a selfless defender of womanhood and scourge of a corrupt police force, pilloried as a meddler and a publicity hound, and libeled as a drug addict and frequenter of prostitutes. Whatever Crane's motives may have been, the affair was a highly stressful one for him and took a great toll, costing him, among much else, the friendship of then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.
In November of 1896, Crane met Cora Taylor, an intelligent woman with literary inclinations several years his senior, who was operating a house of assignation in Jacksonville, Florida. She was to become his companion for the rest of his life—although she called herself Cora Crane and was introduced by Crane as his wife, no evidence of a marriage has ever come to light—and an untiring champion of his work and reputation after his death. They settled in England in 1897, where they were quickly accepted into a circle of British and American novelists, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Harold Frederic, and Ford Madox Ford. Meanwhile, Crane continued his astonishing productivity as both journalist and literary artist, covering the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Spanish-American War in 1898, and publishing in the single year of 1898 some of his finest short stories, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," "Death and the Child," "The Monster," and "The Blue Hotel."
In the last year or so of his life, Crane suffered from increasingly virulent attacks of tuberculosis, aggravated by a punishing work schedule. Many of these writing projects were hack work undertaken out of financial need. With their money virtually gone and surviving on the generosity of friends, Cora brought Stephen to a health spa at Badenweiler, Germany, where he died on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight.
Although there was an element of romance and swagger in his life and in some of his writing, his best work remains as fresh and effective as when it was written. Identifying with the fearful and the outcast, attacking complacency and intolerance, presenting even the most unsavory aspects of existence, disciplining style and structure to a unity of effect, and doing all of these things in works of great power and insight, Stephen Crane made permanent contributions not only to the body of American literature but also to its very shape and direction.
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