NAME: Stephen Crane
BORN: 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, USA
DIED: 5 June 1900 in Badenweiler, Germany (buried in Hillside, New Jersey)
NATIONALITY: American
LIVED: America and England
MARRIED: no
CHILDREN: none
What was he like?
Stephen Crane was the youngest of fourteen children, only eight of whom survived into adulthood. His father was a Methodist minister who died in 1880, leaving his mother and his older brothers to raise him. As a small child, Crane dreamed of being a soldier and as he grew up became increasingly interested in war. He didn’t particularly enjoy studying and he was a bit of a rebel. He started out at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania to pursue a mining and engineering degree, transferred to Syracuse University after only one semester, and then dropped out after taking only one class. But he always loved literature and writing and by the age of sixteen he was writing articles for the New York Tribune, whilst living with one of his brothers in Paterson, New Jersey.
Where did he grow up?
Stephen Crane grew up in New Jersey. He was often ill as a child and when he contracted scarlet fever the family moved to Port Jervis, New York – a place where Stephen had previously recovered from severe colds. Stephen and his sister Helen later moved to a house in Asbury Park, New Jersey, to be with their brother Townley and his wife. (The house is now a museum: the Stephen Crane House.) When he was grown up he went to England with his companion, Cora Taylor, and lived in the town of Oxted in Surrey, near London.
What did he do apart from writing books?
After the success of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, Stephen wrote a series on Civil War battlefields, worked as a newspaper journalist for several different publications and became a war correspondent, first in Greece during the Greco–Turkish conflict, then during the Spanish–American War. On his way to report on a rebellion on the island of Cuba in 1896 his ship sank off the coast of Florida, leaving him stuck in a small dinghy for several days, narrowly escaping death. This experience directly led to his most famous short story, ‘The Open Boat’ (1898).
Where did Stephen Crane get the idea for The Red Badge of Courage?
Stephen Crane had always been fascinated by the subject of war and, it has been reported, by the game of baseball. It was actually on the pitch where Crane put into practice certain moves and stratagem to beat his opponents, and he used what he had learned to create The Red Badge of Courage – one of the most famous war stories ever written.
What did people think of The Red Badge of Courage when it was first published?
Published in 1895, The Red Badge of Courage brought Crane instant worldwide fame and fortune. Many readers were impressed by its brutally honest portrayal of war and he was highly praised for capturing the sights and sounds of actual combat. ‘They all insist I am a veteran of the Civil War,’ Crane noted. But in fact at the time of writing the novel he had never even seen a battle.
What other books did he write?
Despite his short life (he died from tuberculosis at the very young age of twenty-eight), Stephen Crane was a prolific essayist, poet, short-story writer and novelist. His first book was called Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (a grim, realistic story of slum life which he researched by living on the streets himself), and was published at his own expense in 1893. This was followed by The Red Badge of Courage which became renowned as the first modern war novel. Crane’s travels as a journalist inspired a poetry collection called The Black Riders and Other Lines (1897) and what is said to be his finest short story, ‘The Open Boat’.