Stephen Crane

(1871–1900)

He was an explosion of color in a gray age.

(Linda Davis, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane)

When he was 25 years old, Stephen Crane wrote, “I AM MINDED to die in my 35th year. I think that is all I care to stand”. Four years later Crane was dead. Famous today for his brief life as a hard-living writer who sought to create a bold new language that would capture the unvarnished facts of real life, Crane was in his own day one of the most widely recognized, revered, and admired authors of his generation. From the vantage of the present, we can see how Crane incorporated the plain language of average people, the use of dialect, and the skeptical view of American culture that were so central to literary realism and so evident in the work of contemporaries such as Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens). We can also begin to see more clearly how Crane’s concentration on linguistic brevity, sharp images, and careful use of symbols paved the way for future writers such as Ernest Hemingway, who would develop his own pared-down language to describe for his generation the harsh reality of war and the deep ironies that accompany America’s quest for spiritual certainty.

Stephen Crane was born November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, the 14th and last child of Mary Helen Peck Crane and the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Townley Crane. His father was a Methodist minister who wrote pamphlets condemning drinking, card playing, smoking, and dancing. Stephen, a rebel in his life as well as his writing, reacted by cultivating all of these vices. He even rejected organized religion, though he did not necessarily reject God. His thoroughgoing rebellion may have at least in part been a reaction to great losses in his young life: His father died when he was seven; his sister Agnes Elizabeth died when he was 12; and his older brother Luther Peck died two years later. Within two years of his brother’s death, Crane had purchased his first beer at the exhibition grounds outside Asbury Park, the community on the New Jersey coast where the Crane family moved in 1883, after Stephen’s father’s death. Responding to the astonishment of his friend George Wheeler, who was with him at the time, Crane asked, “ ‘How you going to know about things at all less’n you do ’em? ’ ”.

Crane’s life moved quickly. After completing school in Asbury Park and Pennington Seminary in New Jersey, Crane attended Claverack College for a time, spent a semester at Lafayette College, and studied for one semester at Syracuse University, where he wrote the fi rst draft of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. By the time he was 20 he had entered a love affair with Helen Trent that ended when he found out that she was going to marry someone else. His mother died that same year. He had another failed love relationship the next year, with Lily Brandon Monroe, a married woman.

He had begun work at the New York Tribune when he was 16 years old, but he lost this job in 1892 after writing “On the New Jersey Coast—Parades and Entertainments, ” an unflattering account of the American Day parade (a patriotic parade of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics). He finished Maggie: A Girl of the Streets the following year, but it was rejected by publishers because of its lurid, shocking scenes. About his rejection Crane is quoted as saying, “ ‘You’d think the book came straight from hell and they smelled the smoke’ ”. Crane borrowed money and self-published the book; however, fewer than six copies were sold. Despite these abysmal sales, the book (somewhat miraculously) captured the attention of the writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, who helped launch Crane’s career. Garland recommended Crane’s poems to Howells, who in turn sent them to Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s Magazine. Alden rejected the poems, but others took note of the attention paid by Howells. Later, Garland edited The Red Badge of Courage and recommended it for publication. It eventually appeared in serial form in the Philadelphia Press, December 3–8, 1894, and was published as a book in 1895.

The early 1890s were tumultuous years marked by bouts of poverty and spates of heady creativity, out of which Crane struggled to establish himself as a writer. He dedicated his energies primarily to poetry and fiction during this time, but in order to eke out a living went back to journalism, applying for a job at the New York Press. However, the editor, Edward Marshall, reportedly thought that full-time journalism would squelch Crane’s creativity and refused to put him on the staff. He told Crane, “I’ll take all the special articles you can do, Steve, but you are made for better things. Don’t waste your time”. Crane did have a few pieces published, but he was not able to escape financial hardship. Difficult as these years were, Crane persevered and managed to complete The Red Badge of Courage, the work for which he is best known today. Crane began writing his famous Civil War novel in about 1893, though he had never seen an actual battlefield. By the time he completed the work in 1894, he had published enough poems and occasional short stories to attract the attention of the publishing world.

The Red Badge of Courage is the story of one boy’s journey of initiation in the fratricidal conflict that was the U.S. Civil War. In The Red Badge Crane achieves a realistic depiction of the ugliness and cruelty of war as he follows the psychological journey of Henry Fleming, a young private who moves from awe and anticipation to fear, outrage, and finally acceptance. In this novel Crane uses vivid colors and animal imagery to put the battlefield in focus. Although it is often referred to as an antiwar novel, many critics consider that characterization a misinterpretation. One critic, Ken Chowder, points out, “Later Crane would write, ‘war is neither magnificent nor squalid: it is simply life.’ But it is intensified life, complete with stupidity and evil; courage, for Crane, is a magnificent thing all the same—absurd, yet magnificent”.

As a book devoted to removing the romantic sheen from war, especially the belief that manhood is somehow proven on the field of honor, the book is decidedly antiwar, but that is not its only message. Perhaps because it addressed war from so many perspectives—aesthetic and political, as well as theological and psychological—the novel spoke powerfully to many readers, becoming a best seller and in the process making Crane a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic.

In January of the following year, when Crane was 23, the New York Press sent him to a totally new frontier—the American West—“for new color, ” the publisher said. The last stop was to be Mexico City. This trip renewed Crane’s faith in man’s ability to make a difference and tempered the earlier more pessimistic tones in his works. Short stories that grew out of this period but were published much later include two of his most admired works, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1897) and “The Blue Hotel” (1899).

In late December 1896 Crane was dispatched on the steamship Commodore to Cuba to report on the Cuban revolution. The Commodore never arrived at its destination. It struck a sandbar when leaving the port of Jacksonville, Florida, on New Year’s Eve; it began to take on water and sank two days later. After all of the lifeboats were taken, Crane escaped in a dinghy with three other passengers. After 30 hours of exposure and exhausted after rowing nonstop against high seas, the men lost control of the vessel while trying to go ashore. The dinghy capsized, and the four were forced to swim half a mile before reaching land, arriving on the beach at Daytona, Florida, on January 2, 1897. The original news story was published as “Stephen Crane’s Own Story”; later, the experience was enhanced and developed into “The Open Boat.” This story is generally considered to be naturalistic and somewhat pessimistic in its depiction of the men’s struggle to survive because of its emphasis on battle with an unyielding sea and its prevailing sense of divine indifference, but Patrick Dooley believes that interpretation to be unfounded: “A consummate ironist, Crane was neither a pessimist nor an optimist; he was, rather a meliorist who believed that improvement was possible”. Other critics agree, saying the story depicts the power of solidarity as shown through the coordinated efforts of the men while struggling to survive on the dinghy.

Even after the shipwreck Crane remained fascinated with the experience of war. Hearing of the struggle for independence taking place on the Greek island of Crete, he traveled to Greece in 1897 as war correspondent for the New York Journal. His current love, Cora Taylor, accompanied him with the aim of becoming one of the first female war correspondents. Crane had fallen in love with Taylor in Jacksonville, where she was the owner and hostess of a house of ill repute called the Hotel de Dream. When the Greco-Turkish War ended later that year, the couple moved to England, where they lived as husband and wife, though they were never married. During this period Crane began a close friendship with the writer Joseph Conrad that would endure until the end of Crane’s life.

The war over Cuba continued, and Crane wanted to be part of it. In April 1898 he left Taylor to return to the United States, where he tried to enlist in the navy. He failed the physical exam but found work in Cuba as a war correspondent for the New York World, for which he completed 20 dispatches on the Spanish-American War, including one on the Battle of San Juan. After spending nine months in Cuba, Crane returned to Taylor, who had purchased a huge, dank castle and incurred a substantial debt. Nevertheless, he and Taylor lived lavishly, even though he knew his health was failing from tuberculosis (TB). Toward the end of an all night party shortly after Christmas 1899, he leaned over a guest and coughed up blood. He still refused to give up. With the coming spring he moved to a TB sanitarium in Germany, but he was past hope. He died on June 5, 1900, at the age of 28. Nevertheless, in his few short years of writing, Stephen Crane had made an indelible impression on American literature.

Crane began writing short stories at the age of eight. He was mostly self-taught, though his mother and father were both published writers and he grew up in a home where writing was seen as a noble vocation and the written word highly valued. He flunked out of Lafayette College in 1890 (he spent most of his time cutting classes and playing baseball) and the following year dropped out of Syracuse University (where his maternal godfather was president) after just one term. However, it was while at Syracuse that he drafted Maggie and met Garland, who encouraged Crane. Garland and another writer friend, Howells, were both early writers of realism whose work infl uenced Crane’s style.

Crane’s profession as a journalist demanded a keen eye for detail and an ear for dialect that contributed to an already avid interest in persons from all walks of life. He said that his favorite part of the job was going to police court. There, he encountered all types of people. His sensitive eye and ear registered every appearance, action, and accent. Given his interest in police court, it did not take him long to discover the seamier side of town. He was impressed by the efforts of simple men who fought for their livelihoods in the crowded streets of New Jersey shore towns and Manhattan; perhaps in rebellion against his strict moral upbringing, he was enticed by the more negligent ways of life he discovered there. One biographer points out that these streets became Crane’s new university: He began making trips into New York, wandering into the tenements and exploring the bowery, the brazen, mile-long strip of saloons and dance halls, brothels, flophouses, and dirty, unlighted alleyways lying east of Broadway, from Worth Street to about East 4th Street. A university unto itself, the Bowery was a place of lost souls and souls for sale, Manhattan’s ragged, gaudy edge, where the show went on dependably each night.

Crane took in every sight and sound. Even the most commonplace objects caught his eye: the cast-aside furniture, the blowing papers, the grimy children on the sidewalk, and the colors—the expected gray and brown of the slums, but also red and yellow and green. He heard the horses grunting, the feet shuffling, the newsboy hawking his papers, the landlord cursing a tenant, the children laughing. He stored these memories and drew on them for color, metaphor, and imagery in his writing, especially Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which he began when he was just 19. His biographer Linda Davis described Crane as “an explosion of color in a gray age”.

Realistic literature aims to show life “as it really is, ” much as an untouched photograph that reveals all the detail, both the good and the bad. Realists like Crane challenged romantic belief in the existence of a divine order that informed human history and enabled people to trust that civilization was progressive and would ultimately contribute to the fulfi llment of a grand spiritual purpose. Crane lived in a time of great change in the United States, when many inventions, such as the camera, were reshaping American culture, accelerating the pace of change, and creating the impression of cultural advance. The transcontinental railway, the transatlantic cable, the electric light bulb, the telephone, all suggested that a new era of enlightened thought was dawning in America. The steam engine and the internal-combustion engine opened up vast areas for development and increased factory production but also contributed to the spread of the assembly line that meant machinery replaced skilled craftsmen with faceless line workers. As the factories grew, so did the numbers of child and women laborers. The cities became crowded with workers looking for employment, and the competition for jobs intensified. For many the inner city became its own special form of battlefield. Crane’s realism recorded these sweeping changes.

Naturalistic literature—often confused with realism—also emerged in the second half of the 19th century and can be thought of as a particularly gritty outgrowth of realism that plays an important role in Crane’s writing. Naturalists, as do realists, depict real-life situations, but they tend to place greater importance on the influence of external forces that dictate individual behavior, such as heredity and environment, sometimes giving special attention to the role of chance. The forces at play in Crane’s writing included nature, as in “The Open Boat, ” or war, as in The Red Badge of Courage, or poverty and abuse, as in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In these works Crane questions the ability of individuals to make choices that alter the course of their lives, suggesting instead that people are determined by their surroundings.

Crane’s training as a journalist would serve him well in the realistic sections of his two most famous works, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. For example, Maggie, his first novel, begins, “A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil’s Row who were circling madly around the heap and pelting at him.” Thus, the novel begins with a graphic description of the kind of squalor Crane was to know as a reporter; it also depicts the violent efforts of a small and insignificant person who is threatened by poverty, as well as the human antagonists who compete with him for physical dominance. Similar scenes would appear throughout the body of work he would create over the course of his life. He is often cited as saying that all of life is war, and his protagonists often react to that war violently. Maggie’s war zone is the Bowery district of New York City, an area of urban slums where she battles against an abusive family and an uncaring community of adults who take advantage of her. Maggie’s inability to overcome the odds stacked against her meant that she had to fall back on whatever resources she had, including the sale of her body through prostitution. When she dies, the reader is unsure whether it is suicide or murder.

One critic points out that though Crane often wrote about experiences he had not lived through himself, he was often dangerously close to those experiences afterward: “He began The Red Badge of Courage at 21, before he’d been within a thousand miles of war; a few years later, he became a daring war correspondent. He wrote about a prostitute, then fell in love with a real-life madam. He wrote stories about shipwrecks and subsequently found himself in one”. There was a degree of recklessness that went along with Crane’s determination to discover for himself the full range of human emotion and physical sensation. As Chowder puts it, “Most of the spectacularly theatrical events of his life have one thing in common. In each of them, Crane was engaged in fierce struggle—against the police, the press and standards of public morality, against the cruel sea, enemy bullets and incurable disease, against violence, nature and death”. His great achievement, though, was not brought about by the extremes and bizarre twists that characterized his biography, or by his choice of unconventional subject mater; rather, it was the skill with which he crafted highly structured texts rich in symbolic significance that probed the deepest mysteries of human experience. His single greatest and most pervasive theme may have been finding a way to arrive at a sense of moral purpose in a universe that projects a vast indifference and all too frequently limits the scope of human action.

Although he is best known for his prose, Crane also published two important volumes of experimental poetry: The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899). His poetry echoes his questioning of primary cultural assumptions and the investigations into the meaning of human life that are so prominent in his prose. He also adapts the vivid imagery; bold, stark detail; memorable metaphors; and abundant symbolism. In poetic form, however, Crane’s rejection of conventional answers to questions about the aims of war, the nature of love, or the indifference of the universe is expressed even more directly. Poems like “God Lay Dead in Heaven” and “A Man Said to the Universe” draw on the free verse Crane discovered in Walt Whitman and the highly compressed lyric form that he encountered in Emily Dickinson to reveal a vision void of easy answers and often anarchic in its implications. In many ways Crane’s poems speak more directly to readers today than they did when Crane was alive. Our present-day awareness of the dehumanizing force of war, the impersonality of drought, epidemic disease, global warming, opportunistic dictatorships, and greed on a global scale have made Crane’s stance seem less radical. His poems, especially, have attracted new readers in recent years and may in future years match or even eclipse in popularity his prose works.