The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Crane, Stephen
Crane, Stephen
(
1871
–
1900
), born in New Jersey, the son of a Methodist minister. He worked as a journalist in New York before attempting to publish his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (
1893
), which was too grim to find a readership. His next work, The Red Badge of Courage (
1895
), a study of an inexperienced soldier (
Henry
Fleming
) and his reactions to the ordeal of battle during the American Civil War, although based on no personal experience of war was hailed as a masterpiece of psychological realism, and Crane found himself working as a war reporter in Mexico, Cuba, and Greece. He came to England (where his novel had been even more warmly greeted than in the USA) in
1897
, already ill with tuberculosis; he developed a close friendship with
Conrad
(to whose work his own was compared), and met many other literary figures, including
H.
G.
Wells
, who described his short story ‘The...
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