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Stephen Crane: Born in Newark, Author of the Red Badge of Courage and Renowned 19th Century Poet (1871-1900) by Daniela Gioseffi ©2001 for NJPoets.com 
The Black Riders and Other Lines
Along with his work as a novelist, journalist, and short-fiction writer, Stephen Crane was renown as an original and innovative writer of verse. His two collections of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899), are influential early experiments in free verse and display Crane’s sardonic wit, as in the samples given below. His other writings include Active Service (1899), Whilomville Stories (1900), and Wounds in the Rain (1900). The Collected Letters of Stephen Crane were published in 1954 and add much insight to the poet’s work and life. Bibliographical Sources: For more on Stephen Crane visit Online Encyclopedia at: http://encarta.msn.com or The Columbia Encyclopedia’s Sixth Edition, 2001. Works of Stephen Crane. 10 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967-75, works of Stephen Crane, ed. by F. Bowers (10 vol., 1969—76); letters, ed. by S. Wertheim and P. Sorrentino (2 vol., 1988); biographies by J. Berryman (1950, repr. 1975), R. W. Stallman (1968), who has assembled a useful bibliography, 1972, and L. H. Davis (1998); studies by M. Holton (1972), R. M. Weatherford, ed. (1973), F. Bergon (1975), D. Halliburton (1989), and C. Benfey (1992); The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. Ed. Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Stallman, Robert Wooster. Stephen Crane: A Critical Bibliography. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1972.. Wertheim, Stanley.The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871-1900. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994.
The above article written from various sources cited above by Daniela Gioseffi © 2001, NJPoets.com THE POETRY OF STEPHEN CRANE Born in Newark, New Jersey 1871 - Died in Europe 1900 |
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Stephen
Crane was in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871. The 14th child of a Methodist
minister, Crane was raised in Port Jervis, N.Y and Asbury park, New
Jersey. He graduated from Lafayette College and Syracuse University,
and in 1891 began work in New York City as a freelance jounalist amidst
life in the poverty stricken ghettos of the city. From his own impoverished
life on the Bowery, he garnared themes for his first novel, Maggie,
a Girl of the Streets (1893), self-published with his own funds
under the name, Johnston Smith. The novel was the forsaken and sympathetic
tale of a youthful prostitute who committed suicide. It was praised
by the established American writers Hamlin Garland and William Dean
Howells, which gave Crane heart to continue with his writing, but the
book was not a financial success or widely read. Crane's next novel,
The Red Badge of Courage (1895), won international acclaim as
a deeply realistic psychological study of a young soldier of the American
Civil War (1861-1865). The book is still considered one of the great
classics of 19th Century American literature, and it places
Crane among the first American exponents of naturalism as style
of writing akin to the "naturalism" of the great Russian writer,
Emile Zola. Crane is known for his bleak and grim portrayals of the
human condition His brutal realism is counter-pointed by an alluring
poetic grace and deeply empathetic character portrayal. Though he stressed
irony and paradox, he made inventive use of imagery and symbolism.
Crane,
himself, had never lived through the experience of serving in the military,
but his profound understanding of the ordeals of armed combat, inspired
both American and foreign newspapers to enlist him as a war correspondent
at the junctures of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Spanish American
War begun in 1896. He served as a journalist in Cuba and in Greece,
and in 1897 he married Cora Taylor, who was the mistress of a Florida
brothel which he frequented upon his return from Cuba. Cora Taylor would
remain his devoted friend and wife until the end of his life and she
would nurse him on his deathbed, but his unorothodox, common law marriage,
coupled with his bohemian ways stimulated rumors that Crane was a drug
addict and even a worshipper of satan. Due to his work among the poor
and downtrodden, and his early life of proverty as a freelance writer
amidst the slums of the city, he contracted tuberculosis–a prevalent
disease of his time. His own life and suffering were the basis for the
title story of his 1898 collection of short fiction, The Open Boat
and Other Stories. Crane’s free wheeling life style and his
sexual affairs caused enough scandal to drive him to the life of an
expatriot and he moved to England in 1897 where he met H.G. Wells and
Joseph Conrad with whom he shared camraderie. To escape the widespread
slander of American Puritanical judgements, Crane spent the last years
of his life in Europe, dying of tuberculosis in Germany at the youthful
and tragic age of twenty-eight with Cora Taylor–the prostitute
whom he had saved from her life as a brothel queen-- his faithful companion
at his side. The world will never know what further masterpieces of
American literature Stephen Crane might have produced if his countrymen
had been less judgemental--or if Crane had lived to the age of Walt
Whitman, for one example, with shom he shared his realizations of the
evils of the American Civil War in his writings. Despite this poet’s
early demise, he has forged a lasting and seminal place in 19th
Century American literary art–a place which heralded the styles
of American poets who would follow. C.K. Williams, for one contemporary
example, also born in Newark, shares his bleak and naturalistic consciousness
of social evils, and C.K. Williams’s poetry also embodies a deeply
psychological tone somewhat akin to that of The Red Badge of Courage.