Stephen Crane Books

Easton Press Stephen Crane books:
The Red Badge of Courage - 1980
Maggie: A Girl of The Streets - 1981
Short Stories of Stephen Crane - 1996

Franklin Library Stephen Crane books:
The Red Badge of Courage - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1976
The Red Badge of Courage - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1979
Stories of Stephen Crane - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1982
Maggie: A Girl of The Streets - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1983
The Red Badge of Courage - World's Best Loved Books - 1983

 

Stephen Crane biography
Stephen Crane (1871-1900), was an 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.

The Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge of Courage, written in 1895 by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest of all American novels. This is a book about the Civil War, and one Union soldier's struggle with his inner demons as he prepares for, and fights his first battle.

Henry Fleming has joined the Union army because of his romantic ideas of military life, but soon finds himself in the middle of a battle against a regiment of Confederate soldiers. Terrified, Henry deserts his comrades. Upon returning to his regiment, he struggles with his shame as he tries to redeem himself and prove his courage.

The Red Badge of Courage is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It reports on the American Civil War through the eyes of Henry Fleming, an ordinary farm boy turned soldier. It evokes the chaos and the dull clatter of war: the acrid smoke, the incessant rumours of coming battles, the filth and cold, the numbing monotony, the unworldly wailing of the dying.
Like an impressionist painter, Crane also captures the strange beauty of war: the brilliant red flags against a blue sky, steel bayonets flashing in the morning sun as soldiers step off into battle. In the midst of this chaotic outer world, he creates an intricate inner world as he takes us inside the head of Henry Fleming.

The Red Badge of Courage is Stephen Crane’s second book, notable for its realism and the fact that Crane had never personally experienced battle. Crane drew heavy inspiration from Century Magazine, a periodical known for its articles about the American Civil War. However, he criticized the articles for their lack of emotional depth and decided to write a war novel of his own. The manuscript was first serialized in December 1894 by The Philadelphia Press and quickly won Crane international acclaim before he died in June 1900 at the age of 28.


Maggie: A Girl of The Streets
In 1892 Stephen Crane (1871-1900) published Maggie, Girl of the Streets at his own expense. Considered at the time to be immature, it was a failure. Since that time it has come to be considered one of the earliest American realistic novels. Maggie is the story of a pretty child of the Bowery which is written with the same intensity and vivid scenes of his masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage. In her short life, Maggie "blossomed in a mud puddle", was driven to prostitution, and died by her own hand while still a teenager.

Not yet famous for his Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane was unable to find a publisher for his brilliant Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, finally printing it himself in 1893.
Condemned and misunderstood during Crane’s lifetime, this starkly realistic story of a pretty child of the Bowery has since been recognized as a landmark work in American fiction.

Now Crane’s great short novel of life in turn-of-the-century New York is published in its original form, along with four of Crane’s best short stories The Blue Hotel, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The Monster, and The Open Boat–stories of such remarkable power and clarity that they stand among the finest short stories ever written by an American.

Crane, who worked as a free lance reporter, was in many ways addicted to the low life of the cities.

The collected short work of the American master, included The Red Badge of Courage and A Girl of the Streets. Stephen Crane died at the age of 28 in Germany. In his short life, he produced stories that are among the most enduring in the history of American ficiton. The Red Badge of Courage manages to capture both the realistic grit and the grand hallucinations of soldiers at war. A Girl on the Streets reflects the range of Crane's ability to invest the most tragic and ordinary lives with great insight. James Colvert writes in the introduction to this "Here we find once again the major elements of Crane's the egotism of the hero, the indifference of nature, the irony of the narrator ... Crane is concerned with the moral responsibility of the individual ... (and) moral capability depends upon the ability to see through the illusions wrought by pride and conceit the ability to see ourselves clearly and truly." Great Short Works of Stephen Crane Includes : The Red Badge of Courage; A Girl of the Streets; The Monster . An Experiment in Misery; A Mystery of Heroism; An Episode of War; The Upturned Face; The Open Boat; The Pace of Youth; The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky; The Blue Hotel.