About author Stephen Crane
Crane, Stephen (1871-1900), American writer, born in Newark, N.J., and educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. From free-lance reporting (1890-99) in the slums of New York he drew material for his first novel, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), which was published under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The work won praise from the American writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, but it was unsuccessful. His next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), gained international recognition as a penetrating study of a young soldier in the Civil War. Although Stephen Crane had never experienced military service, the understanding of the ordeals of combat which he revealed in his work induced various American and foreign newspapers to hire him as a correspondent during the Greco-Turkish War (1897)and the Spanish-American War (1898). Shipwrecked while accompanying an expedition carrying arms to Cuba in 1896, Stephen Crane suffered privations which brought on tuberculosis. His experience at sea was described in the title story of his collections The Open Boat and Pother Stories (1898). He settled in England in 1897 and died during a visit to a health resort in Baden, Germany.
Stephen Crane may be considered a forerunner, if not a founder of naturalism in American literature. However, the starkness of his realistic portrayals is relieved by his poetic charm and sympathetic understanding of character. Stephen Crane was also an innovator in verse techniques. His two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War is Kind and Other Poems (1899), are important early examples of experimental free-verse. |
