Editing Stephen Crane (section)

==Fiction and poetry==

===Style and technique===
Stephen Crane's fiction is typically categorized as representative of [[Naturalism (literature)|Naturalism]], [[American realism]], [[Impressionism (literature)|Impressionism]] or a mixture of the three.  Critic Sergio Perosa, for example, wrote that the work presents a "symbiosis" of Naturalistic ideals and Impressionistic methods.<ref>Nagel, p. 8</ref>  When asked whether he would write an autobiography in 1896, Crane responded that he "dare not say that I am honest.  I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow."<ref>Wolford, p. 99</ref>  Similarities between the stylistic techniques in Crane's writing and [[Impressionism|Impressionist painting]]—including the use of color and [[chiaroscuro]]—are often cited to support the theory that Crane was not only an Impressionist but also influenced by the movement.<ref>Rogers, p. 292</ref>  H. G. Wells remarked upon "the great influence of the studio" on Crane's work, quoting a passage from ''The Red Badge of Courage'' as an example: "Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.... From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects."<ref>Wells, p. 234</ref>  Although no direct evidence exists that Crane formulated a precise theory of his craft, he vehemently rejected [[Sentimentalism (literature)|sentimentality]], asserting that "a story should be logical in its action and faithful to character.  Truth to life itself was the only test, the greatest artists were the simplest, and simple because they were true."<ref>Nagel, p. 18</ref>

[[Image:Battle of Chancellorsville.png|thumb|left|''[[Battle of Chancellorsville]]'' by Kurz and Allison; Crane's realistic portrayal of war has earned him recognition from numerous critics and scholars throughout the years]]
Poet and biographer [[John Berryman]] suggested that there were three basic variations, or "norms", of Crane's narrative style.<ref>Bergon, p. 2</ref>  The first, "flexible, swift, abrupt and nervous", is best exemplified in ''The Red Badge of Courage'', while the second ("supple majesty") is believed to relate to "The Open Boat", and the third ("much more closed, circumstantial and 'normal' in feeling and syntax") to later works such as ''The Monster''.<ref>Berryman, p. 284</ref> Crane's work, however, cannot be determined by style solely on chronology.  Not only does his fiction not take place in any particular region with similar characters, but it varies from serious in tone to reportorial writing and light fiction.<ref>Gibson (1968), p. 146</ref>  Crane's writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is consistently driven by immediacy and is at once concentrated, vivid and intense.<ref>Bergon, p. 5</ref>  The novels and short stories contain poetic characteristics such as shorthand prose, suggestibility, shifts in perspective and [[Ellipsis|ellipses]] between and within sentences.<ref>Bergon, p. 26</ref>  Similarly, omission plays a large part in Crane's work; the names of his protagonists are not commonly used and sometimes they are not named at all.<ref>Bloom, p. 5</ref>

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.<ref>Bergon, p. 6</ref>  This is apparent in his first novel, in which Crane ignored the romantic, sentimental approach of slum fiction; he instead concentrated on the cruelty and sordid aspects of poverty, expressed using the Bowery's crude dialect and profanity.<ref>Davis, p. 55</ref>  The distinct dialect of his Bowery characters is apparent at the beginning of the text; the title character admonishes her brother saying: "Yeh knows it puts mudder out when yes comes home half dead, an' it's like we'll all get a poundin'."<ref>Beer, p. 84</ref>

===Major themes===
Crane's work is often thematically driven by Naturalistic and Realistic concerns, including ideals versus realities, spiritual crises and fear.  These themes are particularly evident in Crane's first three novels, ''Maggie: A Girl of the Streets'', ''The Red Badge of Courage'' and ''George's Mother''.<ref>Gullason, p. 60</ref>  The three main characters search for a way to make their dreams come true, but ultimately suffer from crises of identity.<ref>Gullason, p. 61</ref> Crane was fascinated by war and death, as well as fire, disfigurement, fear and courage, all of which inspired many works.<ref>Davis, Linda H. 1996. "The Red Room: Stephen Crane and Me". Vol. 64, p.207. ''History Reference Center''.</ref> In ''The Red Badge of Courage'', the main character longs for the heroics of battle but ultimately fears it, demonstrating the dichotomy of courage and cowardice. He experiences the threat of death, misery and a loss of self.<ref>Shulman, p. 444</ref>

Extreme isolation from society and community is also apparent in Crane's work.  During the most intense battle scenes in ''The Red Badge of Courage'', for example, the story's focus is mainly "on the inner responses of a self unaware of others".<ref>Shulman, p. 442</ref> In "The Open Boat", "An Experiment in Misery" and other stories, Crane uses light, motion and color to express epistemological uncertainty.<ref>Shulman, p. 443</ref> Similar to other Naturalistic writers, Crane scrutinizes the position of man, who has been isolated not only from society, but also from God and nature. "The Open Boat", for example, distances itself from [[Romanticism|Romantic]] optimism and affirmation of man's place in the world by concentrating on the characters' isolation.<ref>Bassan, p. 7</ref>

While he lived, Stephen Crane was denominated by critical readers a realist, a naturalist, an impressionist, symbolist, ''Symboliste'', expressionist and ironist;<ref>Splendora, Book Review p. 47</ref> his posthumous life was enriched by critics who read him as nihilistic, existentialist, a neo-Romantic, a sentimentalist, protomodernist, pointilliste, visionist, imagist and, by his most recent biographer, a "bleak naturalist."<ref>Sorrentino, ''Life of Fire'', p 11</ref> At midcentury he was a "predisciple of the New Criticism"; by its end he was "a proto-deconstructionist anti-artist hero" who had "leapfrogged modernism, landing on postmodernist ground."<ref name="Splendora, Book Review, p. 47">Splendora, Book Review, p. 47</ref> As Sergio Perosa wrote in 1964, "The critic wanders in a labyrinth of possibilities, which every new turn taken by Crane's fiction seems to explode or deny."<ref>Perosa, "Naturalism and Impressionism in Stephen Crane's Fiction," p. 80</ref>

As Anthony Splendora noted in 2015, Death haunts Crane's work; it overshadows his best efforts, each of which features the signal demise of a main character.<ref>Splendora, ''Dead Tilt'', p. 135</ref> Allegorically, "The Blue Hotel," at the pinnacle of the short story form, may even be an ''autothanatography'', the author's intentional exteriorization or objectification, in this case for the purpose of purgation, of his own impending death. Crane's "Swede" in that story can be taken, following current psychoanalytical theory, as a surrogative, sacrificial victim.<ref>Splendora, ''Dead Tilt'', p. 139</ref>

Transcending this "dark circumstance of composition,"<ref>Delbanco,''The Art of Youth'', p. 66-67</ref> Crane had a particular telos and impetus for his creation: beyond the tautologies that all art is alterity and to some formal extent mimesis, Crane sought and obviously found "a form of catharsis" in writing.<ref>Sorrentino, ''Life of Fire'', p. 131</ref> This view accounts for his uniqueness, especially as operative through his notorious "disgust" with his family's religion,<ref>Beer, ''The Mauve Decade'', p. 139</ref> their "vacuous, futile psalm-singing".<ref>Sorrentino, ''Life of Fire text'', p. 25</ref> His favorite book was [[Mark Twain]]'s ''Life on the Mississippi'', in which God is mentioned only twice—once as irony and once as "a swindle."<ref name="Splendora, Book Review, p. 47"/> Not only did Crane call out God specifically with the lines "Well then I hate thee / righteous image" in "The Black Riders" (1895), but even his most hopeful tropes, such as the "comradeship" of his "Open Boat" survivors, make no mention of deity, specifying only "indifferent nature." His antitheism is most evident in his characterization of the human race as "lice clinging to a space-lost bulb," a climax-nearing speech in "The Blue Hotel".  It is possible that Crane utilized religion's formal psychic space, now suddenly available resulting from the recent "Death of God",<ref>Splendora, Book Review, p. 46</ref> as a milieu for his compensative art.<ref name="Splendora, Book Review, p. 47"/>

===Novels===
Beginning with the publication of ''[[Maggie: A Girl of the Streets]]'' in 1893, Crane was recognized by critics mainly as a novelist.  ''Maggie'' was initially rejected by publishers because of its atypical and true-to-life depictions of class warfare, which clashed with sentimental tales of that time. Rather than focusing on the rich or middle class, the novel's characters are lower-class denizens of New York's Bowery.<ref>Gibson (1988), p. 2</ref> The main character, Maggie, descends into prostitution after being led astray by her lover.  Although the novel's plot is simple, its dramatic mood, quick pace and portrayal of Bowery life have made it memorable.  ''Maggie'' is not merely an account of slum life, but also represents eternal symbols. In his first draft, Crane did not give his characters proper names. Instead, they were identified by epithets: Maggie, for example, was the girl who "blossomed in a mud-puddle" and Pete, her seducer, was a "knight".<ref>Knapp, p. 44</ref> The novel is dominated by irony, anger, and destructive morality. Critics would later call the novel "the first dark flower of American Naturalism" for its distinctive elements of naturalistic fiction.<ref name="kna1"/>

[[File:Ernest Hemingway 1950.jpg|thumb|Ernest Hemingway (shown on his boat circa 1950) believed ''The Red Badge of Courage'' was "one of the finest books of [American] literature".]]
Written thirty years after the end of the Civil War and before Crane had any experience of battle, ''The Red Badge of Courage'' was innovative stylistically as well as psychologically.  Often described as a [[war novel]], it focuses less on battle and more on the main character's psyche and his reactions in war.<ref>Gibson (1988), p. 3</ref>  It is believed that Crane based the fictional battle in the novel on that of [[Battle of Chancellorsville|Chancellorsville]]; he may also have interviewed veterans of the [[124th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment]], commonly known as the Orange Blossoms, in Port Jervis, New York.<ref>Sorrentino, p. 59</ref>  Told in a [[third-person narrative|third-person limited point of view]], it reflects the private experience of Henry Fleming, a young soldier who flees from combat.  ''The Red Badge of Courage'' is notable in its vivid descriptions and well-cadenced prose, both of which create suspense within the story.<ref>Knapp, p. 61</ref>  Similarly, by substituting epithets for characters' names ("the youth", "the tattered soldier"), Crane injects an [[allegory|allegorical]] quality, making his characters point to a specific characteristic of man.<ref>Knapp, pp. 62–63</ref>  Like Crane's first novel, ''The Red Badge of Courage'' has a deeply [[irony|ironic]] tone which increases in severity as the novel progresses.  The title of the work is ironic; Henry wishes "that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage".  The wound he does receive (from the rifle butt of a fleeing [[Union Army|Union]] soldier) is instead a badge of shame.<ref>Gibson (1988), p. 42</ref>

The novel expresses a strong connection between humankind and nature, a frequent and prominent concern in Crane's fiction and poetry.  Whereas contemporary writers ([[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]], [[Henry David Thoreau]]) focused on a sympathetic bond on the two elements, Crane wrote from the perspective that human consciousness distanced humans from nature.  In ''The Red Badge of Courage'', this distance is paired with references to animals, and men with animalistic characteristics: people "howl", "squawk", "growl", or "snarl".<ref>Gibson (1988), p. 74</ref>

Since the resurgence of Crane's popularity in the 1920s, ''The Red Badge of Courage'' has been deemed a major American text.  The novel has been anthologized numerous times, including in the 1942 collection ''[[Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time]]'', edited by [[Ernest Hemingway]].  In the introduction, Hemingway wrote that the novel "is one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is."<ref>Gibson (1988), p. 15</ref>

Crane's later novels have not received as much critical praise. After the success of ''The Red Badge of Courage'', Crane wrote another tale set in the Bowery.  ''George's Mother'' is less allegorical and more personal than his two previous novels, and it focuses on the conflict between a church-going, temperance-adhering woman (thought to be based on Crane's mother) and her single remaining offspring, who is a naive dreamer.<ref>Knapp, p. 86</ref>  Critical response to the novel was mixed.  ''The Third Violet'', a romance that he wrote quickly after publishing ''The Red Badge of Courage'', is typically considered as Crane's attempt to appeal to popular audiences.<ref>Gibson, p. 140</ref>  Crane considered it a "quiet little story." Although it contained autobiographical details, the characters have been deemed inauthentic and stereotypical.<ref>Knapp, pp. 99–100</ref>  Crane's second to last novel, ''Active Service'', revolves around the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, with which the author was familiar.  Although noted for its [[satire|satirical]] take on the [[melodrama]]tic and highly passionate works that were popular of the nineteenth century, the novel was not successful.  It is generally accepted by critics that Crane's work suffered at this point due to the speed at which he wrote.<ref>Knapp, p. 119</ref>  His last novel, a suspenseful and [[picaresque]] work entitled ''The O'Ruddy'', was finished posthumously by [[Robert Barr (writer)|Robert Barr]] and published in 1903.<ref>Gibson (1966), p. 145</ref>

===Short fiction===
[[File:StephenCrane1899.jpg|thumb|left|upright|"War Memories", which Crane wrote shortly before his death, ends: "the episode was closed. And you can depend upon it that I have told you nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all."<ref>Knapp, p. 172</ref>]]

Crane wrote many different types of fictional pieces while indiscriminately applying to them terms such as "story", "tale" and "sketch".  For this reason, critics have found clear-cut classification of Crane's work problematic.  While "The Open Boat" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" are often considered short stories, others are variously identified.<ref>Schaefer, p. ix</ref>

In an 1896 interview with Herbert P. Williams, a reporter for the ''[[Boston Herald]]'', Crane said that he did "not find that short stories are utterly different in character from other fiction.  It seems to me that short stories are the easiest things we write."<ref>Wolford, p. 90</ref>  During his brief literary career, he wrote more than a hundred short stories and fictional sketches.  Crane's early fiction was based in camping expeditions in his teens; these stories eventually became known as ''The Sullivan County Tales and Sketches''.<ref>Wolford, p. 3</ref>  He 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 subject matter for his stories varied extensively.  His early New York City sketches and Bowery tales accurately described the results of industrialization, immigration and the growth of cities and their slums.  His collection of six short stories ''The Little Regiment'' covered the American Civil War, a subject for which he became famous with ''The Red Badge of Courage''.<ref>Wolford, p. x</ref>  Although similar to Crane's novel, ''The Little Regiment'' was believed to lack vigor and originality.  Realizing the limitations of these tales, Crane wrote: "I have invented the sum of my invention with regard to war and this story keeps me in internal despair."<ref>Knapp, p. 163</ref>

''The Open Boat and Other Stories'' (1898) contains seventeen short stories that deal with three periods in Crane's life: his [[Asbury Park, New Jersey|Asbury Park]] boyhood, his trip to the West and Mexico in 1895, and his Cuban adventure in 1897.<ref>Knapp, p. 145</ref>  This collection was well received and included several of his most critically successful works.  His 1899 collection ''The Monster and Other Stories'' was similarly well received.

Two posthumously published collections were not as successful.  In August 1900 ''The Whilomville Stories'' were published, a collection of thirteen stories that Crane wrote during the last year of his life.  The work deals almost exclusively with boyhood, and the stories are drawn from events occurring in Port Jervis, where Crane lived from the age of six to eleven.<ref>Wertheim (1994), pp. 13–30</ref>  Focusing on small-town America, the stories tend toward sentimentality, but remain perceptive of the lives of children.  ''Wounds in the Rain'', published in September 1900,<ref>Schaefer, p. 89</ref> contains fictional tales based on Crane's reports for the ''World'' and the ''Journal'' during the Spanish–American War.  These stories, which Crane wrote while desperately ill, include "The Price of the Harness" and "The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins" and are dramatic, ironic and sometimes humorous.<ref>Knapp, p. 170</ref>

Despite Crane's prolific output, only four stories—"The Open Boat", "The Blue Hotel", "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky", and ''The Monster''—have received extensive attention from scholars.<ref>Wolford, p. 115</ref> H. G. Wells considered "The Open Boat" to be "beyond all question, the crown of all his work", and it is one of the most frequently discussed of Crane's works.<ref>Schaefer, p. 314</ref>

===Poetry===
{{quote box|bgcolor=#c6dbf7|width= 20%|quote=
<poem>
Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.
</poem>|source= — Stephen Crane<ref>Crane, ''Complete Poems'', p. 49</ref>}}
Crane's poems, which he preferred to call "lines", are typically not given as much scholarly attention as his fiction; no anthology contained Crane's verse until 1926.<ref>Hoffman, p. 64</ref>  Although it is not certain when Crane began to write poetry seriously, he once said that his overall poetic aim was "to give my ideas of life as a whole, so far as I know it".<ref name="berg25">Bergon, p. 25</ref>  The poetic style used in both of his books of poetry, ''The Black Riders and Other Lines'' and ''War is Kind'', was unconventional for the time in that it was written in [[free verse]] without [[rhyme]], [[meter (poetry)|meter]], or even titles for individual works.  They are typically short in length; although several poems, such as "Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind", use stanzas and refrains, most do not.<ref>Hoffman, p. 62</ref>  Crane also differed from his peers and later poets in that his work contains [[allegory]], [[dialectic]] and narrative situations.<ref>Hoffman, p. 65</ref>

Critic Ruth Miller claimed that Crane wrote "an intellectual poetry rather than a poetry that evokes feeling, a poetry that stimulates the mind rather than arouses the heart".<ref name="berg25"/>  In the most complexly organized poems, the significance of the states of mind or feelings is ambiguous, but Crane's poems tend to affirm certain elemental attitudes, beliefs, opinions and stances toward God, man and the universe.<ref name="berg25"/>  ''The Black Riders'' in particular is essentially a dramatic concept and the poems provide continuity within the dramatic structure.  There is also a dramatic interplay in which there is frequently a major voice reporting an incident seen or experienced.  The second voice or additional voices represent a point of view which is revealed to be inferior; when these clash, a dominant attitude emerges.<ref>Katz, p. xxxv</ref>