Who Was Stephen Crane?
Stephen Crane was the first American naturalist novelist – the writer who brought to American fiction the deterministic vision that Zola had introduced in France, the conviction that human beings are the products of forces they cannot control and a universe indifferent to their fate. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, he rejected the faith of his upbringing with a thoroughness that shaped everything he wrote.
His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), published at his own expense when no publisher would take it, is the first American work of naturalist fiction: the story of a girl destroyed by the forces of poverty and environment with a cold inevitability that admits no moral judgment and no redemption. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) brought him international fame – a war novel written by a man who had never seen battle, rendered with a psychological precision that veterans found more accurate than their own memories.
He died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight, having packed more literary achievement into his brief career than most writers produce in a lifetime. He is significant for TLA because his work documents, with unusual precision and unusual honesty, what the universe looks like when God has been removed from it: cold, indifferent, and entirely without the sense of obligation that the human being’s existence seems to demand.
In Their Own Words
“A man said to the universe: / ‘Sir, I exist!’”
– War Is Kind“None of them knew the color of the sky.”
– The Open Boat“The final wall of the father of lies.”
– The Red Badge of CourageSelected Bibliography
- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets – 1893
- The Red Badge of Courage – 1895
- The Open Boat – 1897 – short story
- War Is Kind – 1899 – poetry
- The Monster – 1899 – novella