For other notable men with this name see: Stephen Crane (disambiguation).

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) was an American writer.

Biography

Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey. He began his career as a journalist, working, according to his own account, as a "slum reporter" in New York City. The experience provided him with important material for his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Crane, who released the book under a pseudonym, had to pay for the publishing himself. It was not a commercial success, though it was praised by several other writers of the time.

This was followed by The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a powerful tale of the American Civil War. The book won international acclaim for its realism and psychological depth in telling the story of a young soldier. Crane had never experienced battle personally, but had conducted interviews with a number of veterans, some of whom may have suffered from what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder. Because his depiction of the psychological as well as military aspect of war was so accurate, he was hired by a number of newspapers as a correspondent during the Greco-Turkish (1897) and Spanish-American wars (1898). In 1896 the boat in which he accompanied an American expedition to Cuba was wrecked, leaving Crane adrift for fourteen days. A result of the incident was Crane's development of tuberculosis, which would eventually become fatal. He recounted these experiences in The Open Boat and Other Tales (1898). In 1897, Crane settled in England, where he befriended writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Shortly before his death, he released Whilomville Stories (1900), the most commercially successful of the twelve books he wrote.

Stephen Crane died, aged only 28, in Badenweiler , Germany.

Poems

Stephen Crane published two volumes of poetry:

• The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)
• War is Kind and Other Lines (1899)

His poems are short, untitled, unrhymed, unmetrical, and mysterious, almost koan-like. Rather than try to describe them, we exhibit two of his most famous:

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, "Is it good, friend?"

"It is bitter—bitter," he answered;

"But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart."

("The Black Riders and Other Lines," III)

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;

He climbed for it,

And eventually he achieved it --

It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:

When the man went to the earth

And looked again,

Lo, there was the ball of gold.

Now this is the strange part:

It was a ball of gold.

Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold

("The Black Riders and Other Lines," ####)

External links

• The Stephen Crane Society
• Project Gutenberg e-texts of some of Stephen Crane's works
• The Black Rider and Other Lines at Poets' Corner
• War is Kind and Other Lines at Poets' Corner
• Stephen Crane's Nasty Little Trick in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"