Stephen crane

1871-1900

Stephen Crane was born in a poor family in Newark, New Jersey. He was the fourteenth and last child of the Reverend John Townley Crane, a Methodist minister and published writer in ethics, and Mary Helen Peck, the daughter of a prominent Methodist minister. Both of his parents were active in the temperance movement, and his father moved the family repeatedly as he was transferred to different ministries. Crane's father died when he was nine, and his mother earned extra money by writing for Methodist journals, the New York Tribune, and the Philadelphia Press, all with young Stephen's help.

In 1885, Stephen entered a Methodist boarding school where his father had served as principal, then later transferred to a military boarding school. He attained the rank of cadet captain.

In January 1891, he entered Syracuse University, which was co-founded by his mother's uncle, and became extensively involved in writing and English. Instead of returning to school the next September, he decided to concentrate on his writing, and stayed with artist friends in New York. Crane worked as a newspaper reporter in New York. At 22 he wrote his first novel, “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893), a naturalistic picture of the grim life in New York slums. After the publication of the first novel, Crane began reading Civil War memoirs, and began to write “The Red Badge of Courage” in the spring of 1893.

Crane spent 1895 traveling through the American West and Mexico, writing the whole time. His book of poems, “The Black Riders”, was published in May 1895. “The Red Badge of Courage” was published in October 1895, and quickly became a bestseller, establishing Crane's reputation as an author. Although he met Theodore Roosevelt in New York and shared some of his writing, he fell out of favor with Roosevelt and the New York police when he testified in defense of a woman friend who had been arrested on charges of solicitation¹. Later in 1896, Crane left the U.S. for Cuba to cover the Cuban revolution.

In 1897, the boat from which Crane was covering the Cuban war sank, becoming the inspiration for his story "The Open Boat." In March, Crane took passage to Greece to cover the Greco-Turkish war. His girlfriend, Cora Howorth Steward, was hired by the New York Journal as their first female war correspondent. The two were married during this time, and after the war moved to Oxted, Surrey, in England, where he continued his literary work until he discovered that he was suffering of tuberculosis. He went to Germany to seek a cure but it was too late. He was twenty-nine years old. He was buried by his wife in Hillside, New Jersey. “Wounds in the Rain” (1900), “Great Battles of the World” (1901), and “The O'Ruddy” (1903), were all published posthumously.

“Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” tells a tragedy of a common American girl, who was thrown by the society on the way of prostitution and persecuted by it. The novel's title character, Maggie, Johnson grows up among abuse and poverty in the Bowery neighborhood of New York's Lower East Side. Her mother, Mary, is a vicious alcoholic; her brother, Jimmie, is mean-spirited and brutish. But Maggie grows up a beautiful young lady with romantic hopes for a better life. She falls in love with Pete, whose show of confidence seems to promise wealth and culture. Seduced and abandoned by Pete, Maggie becomes a neighborhood scandal when she turns to prostitution. Crane leaves her death vague - she either commits suicide or is murdered. She seems a natural and hereditary victim, succumbing² finally to the forces of poverty and social injustice that built up against her even before her birth. Like all the people in this short novel, she seems chiefly a type rather than an individuated character, serving to illustrate principles about modern urban life.

We can notice three main themes in his creative work: life of the slums, the tragedy of the war, children’s destitution. His best pacifistic narrative is “The Red Badge of Courage” which tells the history of a soldier Henry Fleming. A son of a farmer, Henry Fleming, in spite of his mother’s protest, goes as a volunteer to the army of the northerners. During the battle the recruit is seized with fear, and he runs to the rear, having shamefully left his friends on a battle-field. During the battle there is a turning in favour of an enemy, and all the northerner’s army falls back, in panic, having raised to a deserter. The young man tries to stop one of the running men to know what has happened, but the man beats his head with a butt-stock, having become absolutely fear-stricken and having been afraid of being stopped. Having been wounded by “his own”, the young man falls behind the running men, and when he comes to a battalion, he is met as a hero!