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Stephen Crane Biography

"I dare not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as weak mental machinery will allow." This sincere and brave man was Stephen Crane, a prolific American novelist, short story writer, journalist, social critic, realist, poet and impressionist. Innovative as he was characterized by modern critics, Stephen was a vehement fan of Realism, Naturalism and Impressionism.

 Crane was born in November, 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey and died in 1900 at the age of 28. He was the fourteenth and last child of a Protestant family. His father was a Methodist minister, who died when Stephen was only eight years old, while his mother was a clergyman’s daughter. In opposition to his family’s beliefs,  he refused to accept the social and the religious traditions of his era. Despite his fragile nature, Crane taught himself to read before the age of four. Although he moved with his family more than three times in the town Port Jervis, New York, Crane was not regularly enrolled in school. However, he was engaged in writing from his early ages. He began writing his own stories when he was eight, while at the age of 16 he published various articles for American newspapers.

 Despite his remarkable intelligence, he was never interested in schooling. He studied at a military academy, Lafayette College, and Syracuse University in New York. Moody and rebellious as he was and declaring college "a waste of time," Crane left school in 1891, as he only cared about his baseball accomplishments. When his mother died, he decided to move to New York. There, he had the chance to observe the social and psychological reality of America. This observation would later constitute the source of his literary inspiration. As he was going in for journalism and trying to make a living in New York, Stephen Crane completed his first draft of his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. He began this first book at Syracuse, encouraged by Hamlin Garland, whom he admired when he had heard a lecture of him in 1891. The novel was finally published at Crane’s own expenses under the pseudonym "Johnston Smith," in 1893, after many  rejections by several editors. Maggie is about a New York girl, who "blossoms in a mud-puddle" and she was forced to resort to prostitution. As one of the reviewers stated "The evident object of the writer is to show the tremendous character and destiny." Furthermore, it focuses on the cruel circumstances in which poverty drives people. Because of its evident naturalistic elements,  it was characterized as "the first dark flower of American Naturalism." Unfortunately, despite the promotion by W. Dean Howells, the book did not sell.

 Later on, Crane was hooked on very crucial issues of the 19th century that were predominantly associated with war, battles, death, courage and fear. Hence, many of his writings rely on these focal concepts, such as The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the Civil War (1895), which is said to be the first modern war novel. Characterized by Crane as a "pot-boiler," it provides an impression of the predicament of an individual soldier who is trapped in a machine-like struggle and in the end,  he abandoned the battlefield. When Crane was researching for the book, he stated  "I wonder that some of those fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they’re as emotionless as rocks." Crane wished to show what the feeling of being in a war is by writing "a psychological portrayal of fear." Although he hadn’t experienced a war until that time, he managed to make the text quite believable. 

This year, his first book of poems, called The Black Riders and Other Lines, was published in Boston by Copeland and Day. Hamlin Garland and W. Dean Howells were impressed by this unconventional, honest and experimental poetry. Generally, his poems were written in free verse, without meter and rhyme. The majority of them were short in length and they did not have regular stanzas and refrains.

Crane was also a war correspondent and he travelled to several places in order to report war events. Thus, he went to Greece, Cuba, Texas and  Mexico. He covered the Spanish War as well as the Greco-Turkish one (1897), which inspired him to write his novella Active Service. Crane went on to write several short stories, such as "The Blue Hotel"  (1898) and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"(1897). His constant rebellion against the morality of the day and the prosecution which was proving that Crane was visiting brothels devastated his reputation. Thus, he decided to move to Florida in the winter of 1896-97. On his way to Cuba, he met Cora Howarth Taylor, the proprietor of a bordello, with whom he lived for the last years of his life.

In 1897, Crane’s ship sank off the coast of Florida. He took advantage of this event and he created the well-known short story "The Open Boat" which, like The Red Badge of Courage, refers to the various responses of people under severe circumstances and the strength, which is needed so as to meet the impediments and hindrances head on. "The Open Boat," which is, among other things, a vein of romanticism, was a big stepping stone for Crane’s course of life and career, since it contributed to the acknowledgement of Stephen Crane as an American literary naturalist.

This spectacular figure was not just representative of Naturalism. Impressionism played an indispensable role in his style, as well. More specifically, the use of color,brought by Impressionist painting, is extensive in Crane’s writing. Having staunchly rejected sentimentality, he makes use of symbols, distinctive dialects and metaphors and he manages to combine "observed detail with convincing dialogue." The consolidation of courage, irony, integrity and generosity is apparent in his writings. Isolation from society, Nature and God, the dichotomy of courage and cowardice dominate in his fiction, non fiction and his life. Courageous as he was, he continued to write even in the last months of his life, after his settlement in England in 1897. Despite the fact  that Crane was suffering from tuberculosis, he wrote thirteen stories in 1899,  predominantly, on the grounds of an economic stalemate. He published his second volume of poetry, War Is Kind and The Monster and Other Stories and he completed 25 of 33 chapters of The O’Ruddy. Unfortunately, this creative period stopped abruptly when Crane, on June, 5, 1900, died in Germany, on account of  two massive hemorrhages,  by leaving behind a great literary work that still influences the American poets, and in general people around  the globe.