For those who don't know much about Stephen Crane, here's a brief summary of his life and works:
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 became a highly paid war correspondent, covering conflicts...for newspaper tycoons
William Randolph Hearst and
Joseph Pulitzer. His 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 high acclaim that he received for his 1895
Civil War novel
The Red Badge of Courage. 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, FL 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 American Realism.
(Above from Wikipedia)
Crane was a founder of Naturalism, which is a branch off of Realism. Both movements were reactions against Romanticism (Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Washington Irving). 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. Typical symbols and motifs of Crane's literature include: tramps/hobos, "little men," children, clerks, correspondents, boats/ships, seamen/fishermen, winter, animals (particularly bears and dogs); his literature is "parable-like," resembling his Czech counterpart, Franz Kafka. Ernest Hemingway was inspired by him.
