STEPHEN CRANE

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist. The eighth surviving child of highly devout parents—his father was a Methodist minister and his mother was a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union—Crane was mostly raised by his older siblings in various parts of New Jersey. After attending several post-secondary institutions, including Claverack College, Lafayette College, and Syracuse University, he left schooling behind and traveled to New York to work as a reporter of slum life.

Crane's first novel was 1893's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which he followed with numerous short stories, poems, and accounts of war, all of which earned him praise but did not bring him the great acclaim he received for his 1895 Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage. Capitalizing on the novel's success, Crane became a highly paid war correspondent, covering conflicts in Greece and Cuba for newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. During the last year of his life he took refuge in the south of England, where he lived with his common-law wife, Cora Taylor, the former madam of a Jacksonville brothel. Plagued by exhaustion and ill health, Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in the Black Forest at the age of twenty-eight. Today he is considered one of the most innovative writers to emerge in the United States during the 1890s and one of the founders of Literary realism

Literary

Crane is noted for his early employment of naturalism, a literary style in which characters face realistically portrayed and often bleak circumstances, but Crane emphasized impressionistic imagery and biblical symbolism rather than graphic realism. Crane's realism, writes William Peden, "is often more impressionistic than photographic; his interest in psychological probing, his innovations in technique and style, and his use of imagery, paradox and symbolism give much of his best work a romantic rather than a naturalistic quality. Both realism and symbolism, the two major directions of modern fiction, have their American beginnings in Crane's work."^[82]

H.G. Wells adds that the painterly quality of Crane's prose, "the great influence of the studio", should not be ignored: "...in the persistent selection of the essential elements of an impression, in the ruthless exclusion of mere information, in the direct vigor with which the selected points are made, there is Whistler even more than there is Tolstoi in The Red Badge of Courage." Wells then selects, "almost haphazard," the following lines from that work to illustrate his point: "At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night. ...From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects."

Stephen Crane's work was described by Wells as "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative."^[83] Crane's peers, including Joseph Conrad and Henry James, as well as later writers such as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Willa Cather, have hailed Crane as one of the finest creative spirits of his time

Death

After a fruitless attempt to improve his health in Greece, Crane died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey.

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