Revealing episodes in the life of the elusive writer, as told by acquaintances This book collects reminiscences by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Stephen Crane that illuminate the life of this often misunderstood and misrepresented writer. Although Crane is widely regarded as a major American author, conclusions about his life, work, and thought remain obscure due to the difficulties in separating fact from fiction. His first biographer recorded mostly vague impressions and, to mythologize his subject, invented a multitude of the episodes and letters used in his account of Crane’s life. Subsequent biographies were either cursory summations or compendiums of verifiable facts. Crane himself was both reclusive and mercurial, protective of his inner life while projecting a variety of personae to suit others. A flamboyant personality and close friend of writers such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, Crane made telling impressions on his contemporaries. They often constitute the best assessments of Crane’s own personality and work. The 90 reminiscences gathered here offer a much-needed account of Crane’s life from a variety of viewpoints, as well as important information about the contributors themselves.

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane. With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death. In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of reading experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.

Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—is surrounded by myths, distortions, and fabrications. Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most accurate account of the poet and novelist to date.

The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by American author Stephen Crane. It is considered one of the most influential works in American literature. The novel, a depiction on the cruelty of the American Civil War, features a young recruit who overcomes initial fears to become a hero on the battlefield. The book made Crane an international success. Although he was born after the war and had not at the time experienced battle firsthand, the novel is considered an example of Realism.

Before he succumbed to a fatal case of tuberculosis at the age of 28, author Stephen Crane penned five remarkably accomplished novels, not to mention dozens of short stories, essays, and sketches. The novel The Third Violet delves deeply into the complexities of love, viewed through the lens of the unlikely romance that blossoms between an up-and-coming artist and an aristocratic socialite.

First published in 1895, The Red Badge of Courage found immediate success and brought its author immediate fame. In his introduction to this volume, Lee Clark Mitchell discusses how Crane broke with the conventions of both fiction and journalism to create a uniquely 'disruptive' prose style. The five essays that follow each explore different aspects of the novel. One studies the problem of establishing the authentic text; another examines it as a war novel; a third considers it as a critique of the rising mood of militant imperialism in the 1890s; a fourth focuses on the double perspective of the novel - its shift between the hero's perspective and a larger, 'cosmic' one; and the final essay examines the novel's deconstruction of courage/cowardice. Written in a highly accessible style, these essays represent the best of recent scholarship and provide students with a useful introduction to this major novel.

This collection offers the complete poems of Stephen Crane (1871 - 1900), as well as essays on him by Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather. One of the best short story writers of all time, Crane was also an important poet who established laconic precision as the dominant style of free verse. His followers included such authors as Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings. Without any doubt, Crane should be regarded as the father of modern-days' literary minimalism.

Though best known for The Red Badge of Courage, his classic novel of men at war, in his tragically brief life and career Stephen Crane produced a wealth of stories—among them "The Monster," "The Upturned Face," "The Open Boat," and the title story—that stand among the most acclaimed and enduring in the history of American fiction. This superb volume collects stories of unique power and variety in which impressionistic, hallucinatory, and realistic situations alike are brilliantly conveyed through the cold, sometimes brutal irony of Crane's narrative voice.