Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
by Robert W. Watson
(25 May 1998)

Stephen Crane was born the last of fourteen children. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother, a preacher's daughter, provided strong leadership for the Women's Christian Temperance Union. From all accounts, Crane was raised in a strict, but loving, home. In addition to this, Crane could boast of his grandfather being president of the Colonial Assemblies when the Declaration of Independence was signed and of being related to an ancestor who helped establish Newark, New Jersey. For a man who had all of the advantages of illustrious ancestors and of gospel preaching, Stephen Crane became a pitiful moral failure common among those who belong to the vast number of American vagabonds. His vagabondage was established early when he moved with his family three times before he was the age of seven. Crane attended many schools during his youth and managed to be expelled from most of them.

As a young boy, Crane was fascinated with military history and warfare. In 1880, Crane entered the military academy, Claverack College and Hudson River Institute (discontinued in 1902). Reportedly, Crane's favourite teacher was General John Bullock Van Petten, Union veteran during the War for Southern Independence. Regarding his short stay at Claverack, Crane stated, "I never learned anything. But heaven was sunny blue and no rain fell on the diamond when I was playing baseball." As for baseball, Crane was quite good at the sport. When his father died, Crane came back to New Jersey, but not until he learned from Claverack the military graces of swearing, gambling, smoking, drinking, and general rabble-rousing.

During the years from 1885 to 1887, Crane attended Pennington Seminary, but he leaves the school, and then in 1888, his brother hired him as a reporter for a new agency in Asbury Park, New Jersey. In 1890, Crane attends Lafayette College only to flunk out after one semester. In 1891, Crane tries academic life one more time at Syracuse University. Needless to say, even though he excelled on the school's baseball team, Crane survived only one semester. His biographer, Edwin H. Cady points out that during this period of his life, Crane was a frequent visitor of the local brothels and of other dens of iniquity. This fascination with human baseness had a certain glory for Crane, and oddly the future author believed police courts offered the most excitement in any town.

However, while at Syracuse University, at the age of twenty-two, Crane finished writing his novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. This novel marked the beginning of "modern American writing," according to poet John Berryman. Some critics have argued that Mark Twain should have this distinction. However, Twain's novels reflect an agrarian tradition not shared by many in today's industrialised aberration of life. What Crane did was to bring the American novel to the dirty, corrupt metropolis. While Twain's characters may be on the lowest rung of society, they manage to overcome their difficulties to prove their self worth, such as Huckleberry Finn. Not so in Crane's Maggie. The girl Maggie is exactly what she is, because her environment decreed it. Even though Maggie has choices, none of the choices are good ones, and whatever she decides to do will be the wrong choice. Later, Jack London will develop this bleak determinism in his novels like The Call of the Wild. What makes Maggie more potent than mere journalistic muckraking is the reader's imagination. It is one thing to report facts about slums with a certain detachment. It is quite another thing to bring such life into the private recesses of the mind.

At first, Maggie was not very successful. Yet Crane played and lived the life of a vagabond. Concerning Crane during this period of his life, Robert Penn Warren wrote, "...he slept on borrowed beds, kept irregular hours, ate irregular meals, found irregular employment, and met with irregular companions." In 1894, The Red Badge of Courage was syndicated and published in the Philadelphia Press. This novel is not merely about the initiation of Henry Fleming to the realities of war. Crane calls Fleming "the youth" many times in the novel, and thus Fleming represents all men who pass from youth to manhood. If Fleming is trapped in his delusions about war, then all men, indeed all societies, are victims of the same fate. For Crane and other determinists, the trouble is discovering the objective standard of reality by which to recognise what is illusion and fantasy. For Crane there is no standard, and life then becomes meaningless. Of course, Crane should have known that the Bible is the only objective standard of reality on the face of the earth. But having rejected this source, Crane is doomed to live in a world of illusions.

In 1895, Crane published a book of poetry, The Black Riders. This book of poetry continued to develop Crane's central conflict of fate against the human will. Perhaps Crane's best poem is "War Is Kind." The poem is a masterpiece in the study of irony, where there are two voices: one is a warmonger, and the other is a professional solder.

In 1896, while in Jacksonville, Florida, Crane met Cora E. Stewart (known as "Cora Howorth Taylor," a "hostess" at the Hotel de Dream, one "of the better houses of ill-fame"). Later Cora will accompany Crane as his "wife" to Europe and will be known as "Mrs. Crane." In 1897 while heading to Cuba to cover the Cubans' fight for independence from Spain, Crane survived the foundering of the ship Commodore. With the injured captain and three other sailors, Crane drifted in a lifeboat off the coast of Florida. From this experience, Crane wrote his short story, "The Open Boat." However, it was the Greco-Turkish War that allowed Crane to see the realities of war firsthand. He was a war correspondent, and the result of his observations was the novel, Active Service.

Afterwards, Crane lived in England accompanied by Cora. But plagued by mounting debts, by Cora's extravagance, and by good, old respectability in general, Crane managed to escape his domestic life in England by becoming a war correspondence in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Even though he was reluctant to return to England (and Cora), Crane does so, but only to be greeted with tuberculosis and with crushing debt. His last days were spent in writing for Harper's (The Whilomville Stories), another volume of poetry (War Is Kind), and a collection of stories (The Monster and Other Stories). His sickness had progressed too much, and even though he received help for Henry James and others, Crane died at Badenweiler, Germany, and his body was transported to New Jersey, where he was buried at Hillside.