Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane: Twenty-Eight Years, and a New American Prose

He wrote the most convincing American novel about the Civil War without having seen a battle, published it at twenty-three, and was dead at twenty-eight. When *The Red Badge of Courage* arrived, H. L. Mencken remembered it coming "like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky"; Joseph Conrad said it "detonated... with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell." Stephen Crane's entire working life lasted about a decade, and modern American prose is unimaginable without it.

The Fourteenth Child

Crane was born on 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth and last child of Jonathan Townley Crane, a Methodist Episcopal minister, and Mary Helen Peck Crane. His father died on 16 February 1880, when Stephen was eight; his mother died on 7 December 1891 at sixty-four, leaving him effectively alone in the world at twenty.

His formal education was brief and unenthusiastic. He attended Lafayette College and then Syracuse University, where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate, and quit in 1891, pronouncing college "a waste of time." His real apprenticeship was journalism: from 1888 to 1892 he spent his summers assisting his brother Townley at a New Jersey shore news bureau. His first bylined piece, on the explorer Henry M. Stanley, appeared in the Claverack College *Vidette* in 1890.

Maggie, and Two Years of Poverty

In 1893 Crane published his first novel, *Maggie: A Girl of the Streets*, self-financed with inherited money and issued under the pseudonym "Johnston Smith." It was a study of tenement life written without moralising or consolation — the minister's son declining to preach. Hamlin Garland called it "the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read." It sold almost nothing, and left Crane broke and depressed.

The Red Badge of Courage

What followed made him famous on two continents. *The Red Badge of Courage* was serialised in American newspapers in December 1894 and published in full by Appleton in 1895. It follows a young Union soldier through his first battle, and it works because it refuses the panoramic view: the reader knows only what a frightened private can see, hear and smell. Crane had never been in combat. He had simply understood that war, experienced from inside, is not a narrative but a sequence of overwhelming sensations.

The book stayed on bestseller lists for four months and went through multiple printings. Crane was twenty-three.

The same year he published *The Black Riders and Other Lines*, a collection of stark, unrhymed, aphoristic verse. Critics were merciless — the Chicago *Daily Inter-Ocean* declared that "there is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page" — and were, as it turned out, describing a form of poetry that had not yet been invented. A second collection, *War Is Kind*, followed in May 1899.

The Dora Clark Affair

Fame did not make him cautious. At two in the morning on 16 September 1896, as Crane was escorting a woman named Dora Clark away from the Broadway Garden, a plainclothes officer, Charles Becker, arrested her for solicitation. Crane, aged twenty-four and at the height of his celebrity, went to court and testified that "while with me she acted respectably, and that the policeman's charge was false."

Clark was discharged. Crane paid for it. During Becker's subsequent trial the New York police went after his reputation and raided his apartment looking for incriminating material. It was an early demonstration of a pattern that ran through his short life: he kept putting himself where the story was, and the story kept costing him.

Thirty Hours in a Dinghy

On New Year's Eve 1896 Crane sailed from Florida aboard the SS *Commodore*, bound for Cuba as a war correspondent. The ship struck a sandbar near Jacksonville, took hull damage and sank on 2 January 1897. Crane spent thirty hours adrift in a ten-foot dinghy with three other men before the boat overturned off Daytona Beach. One of the four died.

Out of it came "The Open Boat," one of the finest short stories in the language, and an opening that does in a sentence what most writers cannot do in a chapter: "None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them."

Cora

Waiting in Jacksonville for passage to Cuba, Crane had met Cora Taylor, thirty-one, proprietor of an establishment called the Hotel de Dream. She was legally married to a British officer, Captain Donald William Stewart, from whom she was estranged, and she and Crane never could marry. She nursed him after the *Commodore* went down, and remained with him for the rest of his life.

When Crane covered the Greco-Turkish War in 1897, Cora went with him and filed dispatches as "Imogene Carter" — the first woman correspondent of that war. Afterwards the couple settled in England, at Ravensbrook in Oxted, Surrey.

Conrad, James, and Brede Place

England gave Crane the literary company America had not. In October 1897 he met Joseph Conrad, beginning what Crane called a "warm and endless friendship"; he also came to know Henry James, H. G. Wells and Edmund Gosse. It is a striking roll-call for a young American who had left university without a degree.

The Spanish-American War pulled him back across the Atlantic in 1898. He covered operations at Guantánamo Bay and was officially cited for "material aid during the action" — a rare commendation for a reporter. Illness forced him home in July.

In early 1899 Crane and Cora moved into Brede Place, a fourteenth-century manor in Sussex offered to them by friends at modest rent, with no electricity and no indoor plumbing. Money was, as always, short, and Crane wrote at a punishing pace to keep ahead of the debts. "I am doing more work now than I have at any other period in my life," he told his publisher. His body could not take it. On 29 December 1899 he suffered a severe pulmonary haemorrhage.

That same December he and Cora threw an elaborate Christmas party at Brede, with Conrad, James and Wells among the guests. Conrad, looking at his wasted friend, later described the occasion as "the most forlorn of all hopes."

Badenweiler, 1900

Crane was taken to Badenweiler, a health spa in Germany's Black Forest, and died there of tuberculosis on 5 June 1900, aged twenty-eight. He left everything to Cora, who brought his body back to New Jersey for burial in Evergreen Cemetery, Hillside.

He was then largely forgotten for two decades. Thomas Beer's biography of 1923, Wilson Follett's collected edition of 1925–27 and John Berryman's study of 1950 rebuilt the reputation, and it has not slipped since. Crane is now read as the most innovative American writer of the 1890s, a direct ancestor of the modernists and the imagists — and, most visibly, of Ernest Hemingway, who inherited from him the conviction that the plainest sentence is usually the most violent.