Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), American novelist and poet, one of the first American exponents of the naturalistic style of writing.

Crane was born November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, and educated at Lafayette College and Syracuse University. He went to New York in 1890 and became a free-lance reporter in the slums. From his work and his own penniless existence, he drew material for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), which he published privately under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. Although the work won praise from the writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, it was unsuccessful. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), gained international recognition as a penetrating, realistic psychological study of a young soldier in the American Civil War.

Although Crane had never experienced military service, the understanding of the ordeals of combat that he revealed in this work induced various American and foreign newspapers to hire him as a correspondent during the Graeco-Turkish War (1897) and the Spanish-American War (1898). Shipwrecked while accompanying an expedition from the United States to Cuba in 1896, Crane suffered privations that eventually brought on tuberculosis. His experience was described in the title story of his collection The Open Boat and Other Stories (1898). He settled in England in 1897; his private life, which included several extramarital affairs, had caused gossip in the United States. In England he was befriended by the writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James. His writings fill 12 volumes. He died at the age of 28 on June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany.

Crane's naturalistic portrayals are pessimistic and brutal, yet the stark realism is relieved by his poetic charm and sympathetic understanding of character. 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. Among his other writings are Active Service (1899), Whilomville Stories (1900), and Wounds in the Rain (1900). Crane's collected letters were published in 1954.