Stephen Crane 1871-1900  by Allen Blarksdale

Born Nov. 1,1871 in Newark, New Jersey, Stephen Crane was the 14th son and youngest child of a Methodist minister. His father J..T. Crane authored a number of books including Popular Amusements (1869) and Arts of Intoxication (1870) which generally addressed moral and ecclestical issues of the day. Stephen's mother, Mary Helen Peck Crane was an active participant in the temprance movement of the 1870s and 80s.

A sickly and frail child, Crane did not attend school prior to age eight. Encouraged by his parents to pursue a carrer as a clergyman, Crane attended the Pennigton Seminary from September 1885-December 1887. His father had served as the institutions principal during the 1850s. In 1888 Crane transfered to Claverack College, a military academy in upstate New York. He was a sucessful cadet achieving the rank of !st Lieutenant. This experience possibly influenced the composition of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895. Later Crane enrolled at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, but after failing five of seven classes he transfered to the university at Syracuse New York.

At Syracuse Crane played baseball and wrote for the school paper but was academically uninspired and left school in 1891. In June 1891 Crane moved to New York City. At this time he began work on his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, utilizing the slums of lower Manhattan as the setting. This work was privately published in early 1893 with Crane using the pseudonym of Jonston Smith. 1894's George's Mother is perceived by some to be a thematic sequel to Maggie.

Although Crane had never experienced war in any form the 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage was praised for it's realism and is wiedly hailed as an American classic in it's depiction of the horrors of the Civil War. The book was hugely popular upon release and established Crane's professional reputation. As a result of this sucess Maggie was republished under Crane's name but in a slightly edited form during 1896.

Crane's next major project was "The Black Riders and Other Lines" a collection of sixty-eight short poems. This was followed by the novel "The Third Violet" the tale of a poor painter's love for a society heiress.

In 1897 Crane sailed to Greece as a war correspondant for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. This experience inspired the short story "Death and the Child." During 1898 he traveled to Cuba to report on the Spanish-American War for the New York World. However, such activity combined with Crane's reckless life-style accelerated his failing health and he died in Sussex of tuberculosis in 1900.

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