Editing Stephen Crane (section)

===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>