Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American novelist, poet and journalist, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, a novel of the Civil War written by a young man who had never seen a battle. He died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight, leaving a body of work that announced modern American fiction.
Genres
novels and stories, poetry
Works
The Red Badge of Courage
A minister's son
Stephen Crane was born on 1 November 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister. After brief periods at Lafayette College and Syracuse University, where he preferred baseball to classes, he became a journalist in New York.
His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), about a young woman in the slums of the Bowery, was published at his own expense and sold almost nothing.
The Red Badge
The Red Badge of Courage, the story of a young Union soldier's fear and courage, was serialised in newspapers in 1894 and published as a book in 1895. It was a sensation in America and Britain; veterans were amazed that its author was too young to have fought.
Crane also published free verse, The Black Riders (1895), unlike anything written in America at the time.
The war correspondent
He reported on the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Spanish-American War of 1898. In January 1897 he survived the sinking of the steamer Commodore off Florida, spending thirty hours in a small boat, which inspired his story The Open Boat.
He settled in England with Cora Taylor at Brede Place in Sussex, where he befriended Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Ill with tuberculosis, he died at Badenweiler in Germany on 5 June 1900.
Anecdotes
Too young for the war
Crane was born six years after the Civil War ended. He said he learned about battle from playing football and from reading the war memoirs published in The Century magazine.
The Open Boat
After the Commodore sank on 2 January 1897, Crane, the captain, the cook and an oiler rowed for thirty hours to reach the shore at Daytona Beach; the oiler drowned in the surf. The story drawn from it is one of his masterpieces.
Frequently asked questions
Did Stephen Crane fight in the Civil War?
No. He was born in 1871, six years after it ended, and wrote The Red Badge of Courage from reading and imagination.
What is The Open Boat?
A short story based on Crane's own survival of a shipwreck off Florida in 1897.
How did Stephen Crane die?
Of tuberculosis, at Badenweiler in Germany, on 5 June 1900, aged twenty-eight.