STEPHEN CRANE Literary Works
...out his literary works. STEPHEN CRANE LIFE: He was born more than six years after the end of the American Civil War. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871, Stephen Crane was his parents' fourteenth (and last) child. Crane moved in 1876 to Paterson, New Jersey, and in 1878 to Port Jervis, a town in upstate New York with his family 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 his father died in 1880, his mother moved the family to Asbury Park, New Jersey. In September 1890, he enrolled at Lafayette College to study mining engineering, but left Crane attended the Hudson River Institute in Claverack, New York, from 1888 to 1890. He entered Syracuse University in January 1891, where he showed more interest in catching for the varsity baseball team than in his studies. 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. 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. 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. In the last year or so of his life, Crane suffered from increasingly virulent attacks of tuberculosis, aggravated by a punishing work schedule. Crane died on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight. LITERARY WORKS: 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. His first major work of fiction, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in two days just before Christmas of 1891. The title character is forced to turn to prostitution after being self-righteously rejected by everyone she has loved and trusted. 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, and England. In 1895 appeared The Black Riders, the first of Crane's two collections of free verse. These are some of his finest short stories, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," "Death and the Child," "The Monster," and "The Blue Hotel." He also wrote: Whilomville Stories, the novel The Third Violet, and one of his greatest short stories, "The Monster." STYLE: Crane had a vivid and impressionistic prose sudden with the kind of striking similes. He had also a disciplined style. A Dark- Brown Dog A CHILD was standing on a street-corner. He ...