90 Facts About Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer.

Stephen Crane is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

The ninth surviving child of Methodist parents, Crane began writing at the age of four and had several articles published by the age of 16.

Stephen Crane won international acclaim in 1895 for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without having any battle experience.

In 1896, Stephen Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after appearing as a witness in the trial of a suspected prostitute, an acquaintance named Dora Clark.

Stephen Crane was befriended by writers such as Joseph Conrad and H G Wells.

At the time of his death, Stephen Crane was considered an important figure in American literature.

Stephen Crane's writing is characterized by vivid intensity, distinctive dialects, and irony.

Stephen Crane's writing made a deep impression on 20th-century writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists.

Stephen Crane was born on November 1,1871, in Newark, New Jersey, to Jonathan Townley Crane, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal church, and Mary Helen Peck Crane, daughter of a clergyman, George Peck.

Stephen Crane was the fourteenth and last child born to the couple.

At 45, Helen Stephen Crane had suffered the early deaths of her previous four children, each of whom died within one year of birth.

Stephen Crane later wrote that his father, Dr Stephen Crane, "was a great, fine, simple mind", who had written numerous tracts on theology.

The family moved to Port Jervis, New York, in 1876, where Dr Stephen Crane became the pastor of Drew Methodist Church, a position that he retained until his death.

Stephen Crane was not regularly enrolled in school until January 1880, but he had no difficulty in completing two grades in six weeks.

Dr Crane died on February 16,1880, at the age of 60; Stephen was eight years old.

Stephen Crane next lived with his brother William, a lawyer, in Port Jervis for several years.

Agnes, another Stephen Crane sister, joined the siblings in New Jersey.

Stephen Crane took a position at Asbury Park's intermediate school and moved in with Helen to care for the young Stephen.

Agnes Stephen Crane became ill and died on June 10,1884, of meningitis at the age of 28.

Stephen Crane wrote his first known story, "Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle", when he was 14.

Stephen Crane's father had been principal there from 1849 to 1858.

Stephen Crane sometimes skipped class in order to play baseball, a game in which he starred as catcher.

Stephen Crane was greatly interested in the school's military training program.

Stephen Crane rose rapidly in the ranks of the student battalion.

In mid-1888, Stephen Crane became his brother Townley's assistant at a New Jersey shore news bureau, working there every summer until 1892.

Stephen Crane joined both rival literary societies, named for Washington and Franklin.

Stephen Crane infrequently attended classes and ended the semester with grades for four of the seven courses he had taken.

Stephen Crane roomed in the Delta Upsilon fraternity house and joined the baseball team.

Stephen Crane published his fictional story, "Great Bugs of Onondaga," simultaneously in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the New York Tribune.

Stephen Crane attended a Delta Upsilon chapter meeting on June 12,1891, but shortly afterward left college for good.

Stephen Crane used this area as the geographic setting for several short stories, which were posthumously published in a collection under the title Stephen Crane: Sullivan County Tales and Sketches.

Stephen Crane showed two of these works to Tribune editor Willis Fletcher Johnson, a friend of the family, who accepted them for the publication.

Stephen Crane showed Johnson an early draft of his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

Stephen Crane moved into his brother Edmund's house in Lakeview, a suburb of Paterson, New Jersey, in the fall of 1891.

Stephen Crane focused particularly on The Bowery, a small and once prosperous neighborhood in the southern part of Manhattan.

On December 7,1891, Stephen Crane's mother died at the age of 64, and the 20-year-old appointed Edmund as his guardian.

Between July 2 and September 11,1892, Stephen Crane published at least ten news reports on Asbury Park affairs.

Stephen Crane struggled to make a living as a free-lance writer, contributing sketches and feature articles to various New York newspapers.

Stephen Crane decided to publish it privately, with money he had inherited from his mother.

In March 1893, Stephen Crane spent hours lounging in Linson's studio while having his portrait painted.

Stephen Crane became fascinated with issues of the Century that were largely devoted to famous battles and military leaders from the Civil War.

Sources report that following an encounter with a male prostitute that spring, Stephen Crane began a novel on the subject entitled Flowers of Asphalt, which he later abandoned.

At the age of 24, Stephen Crane, who was reveling in his success, became involved in a highly publicized case involving a suspected prostitute named Dora Clark.

One of the women was released after Stephen Crane confirmed her erroneous claim that she was his wife, but Clark was charged and taken to the precinct.

The defense targeted Stephen Crane: police raided his apartment and interviewed people who knew him, trying to find incriminating evidence in order to lessen the effect of his testimony.

Stephen Crane left him in 1892 for another man, but was still legally married.

Stephen Crane lived a bohemian lifestyle, owned a hotel of assignation, and was a well-known and respected local figure.

Stephen Crane was finally cleared to leave for the Cuban port of Cienfuegos on New Year's Eve aboard the SS Commodore.

Stephen Crane traveled to Daytona and returned to Jacksonville with Crane the next day, only four days after he had left on the Commodore.

Stephen Crane brought along Taylor, who had sold the Hotel de Dream in order to follow him.

Stephen Crane wrote under the pseudonym "Imogene Carter" for the New York Journal, a job that Crane had secured for her.

The first large battle that Stephen Crane witnessed was the Turks' assault on General Constantine Smolenski's Greek forces at Velestino.

Stephen Crane met the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad in October 1897, with whom he would have what Stephen Crane called a "warm and endless friendship".

Stephen Crane began to attach price tags to his new works of fiction, hoping that "The Bride", for example, would fetch $175.

Meanwhile, Stephen Crane felt "heavy with troubles" and "chased to the wall" by expenses.

Stephen Crane confided to his agent that he was $2,000 in debt but that he would "beat it" with more literary output.

Stephen Crane applied for a passport and left New York for Key West two days before Congress declared war.

Stephen Crane continued to report upon various battles and the worsening military conditions and praised Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, despite past tensions with the Commissioner.

In retaliation, Stephen Crane signed with Hearst's New York Journal with the wish to return to Cuba.

Stephen Crane traveled first to Puerto Rico and then to Havana.

Stephen Crane sporadically sent out dispatches and stories; he wrote about the mood in Havana, the crowded city sidewalks, and other topics, but he was desperate for money again.

Stephen Crane became frantic with worry over her lover's whereabouts; they were not in direct communication until the end of the year.

Stephen Crane left Havana and arrived in England on January 11,1899.

Stephen Crane pushed himself to write feverishly during the first months at Brede; he told his publisher that he was "doing more work now than I have at any other period in my life".

Stephen Crane's health worsened, and by late 1899 he was asking friends about health resorts.

Stephen Crane died on June 5,1900, at the age of 28.

Stephen Crane was interred in Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey.

Stephen Crane's fiction is typically categorized as representative of Naturalism, American realism, Impressionism or a mixture of the three.

Stephen Crane's writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is consistently driven by immediacy and is at once concentrated, vivid and intense.

Stephen Crane was often criticized by early reviewers for his frequent incorporation of everyday speech into dialogue, mimicking the regional accents of his characters with colloquial stylization.

Stephen Crane's work is often thematically driven by Naturalistic and Realistic concerns, including ideals versus realities, spiritual crises and fear.

Stephen Crane was fascinated by war and death, as well as fire, disfigurement, fear and courage, all of which inspired him to write many works based on these concepts.

In "The Open Boat", "An Experiment in Misery" and other stories, Stephen Crane uses light, motion and color to express degrees of epistemological uncertainty.

Similar to other Naturalistic writers, Stephen Crane scrutinizes the position of man, who has been isolated not only from society, but from God and nature.

Transcending this "dark circumstance of composition," Stephen Crane had a particular telos and impetus for his creation: beyond the tautologies that all art is alterity and to some formal extent mimesis, Stephen Crane sought and obviously found "a form of catharsis" in writing.

Similarly, by substituting epithets for characters' names, Stephen Crane injects an allegorical quality into his work, making his characters point to a specific characteristic of man.

Whereas contemporary writers focused on a sympathetic bond on the two elements, Stephen Crane wrote from the perspective that human consciousness distanced humans from nature.

Stephen Crane considered these "sketches", which are mostly humorous and not of the same caliber of work as his later fiction, to be "articles of many kinds," in that they are part fiction and part journalism.

The work deals almost exclusively with boyhood, and the stories are drawn from events occurring in Port Jervis, where Stephen Crane lived from the age of six to eleven.

Stephen Crane differed from his peers and poets of later generations in that his work contains allegory, dialectic and narrative situations.

Critic Ruth Miller claimed that Stephen Crane wrote "an intellectual poetry rather than a poetry that evokes feeling, a poetry that stimulates the mind rather than arouses the heart".

In four years, Stephen Crane published five novels, two volumes of poetry, three short story collections, two books of war stories, and numerous works of short fiction and reporting.

John Berryman's 1950 biography of Stephen Crane further established him as an important American author.

Today, Stephen Crane is considered one of the most innovative writers of the 1890s.

Stephen Crane's peers, including Conrad and James, as well as later writers such as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Willa Cather, hailed Crane as one of the finest creative spirits of his time.

Stephen Crane's work has proved inspirational for future writers; not only have scholars drawn similarities between Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The Red Badge of Courage, but Stephen Crane's fiction is thought to have been an important inspiration for Hemingway and his fellow Modernists.

Near his brother Edmund's Sullivan County home in New York, where Stephen Crane stayed for a short time, a pond is named after him.

Columbia University purchased much of the Stephen Crane materials held by Cora Crane at her death.

The Stephen Crane Collection is one of the largest in the nation of his materials.