Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings
2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Biographical note copyright © 2001 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2001 by Luc Sante
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University Press of Virginia for permission to reprint approximately 90 pages from “New York Journalism” in Volume VIII of The Works of Stephen Crane, edited by Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1973). Copyright © 1973 by the Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Virginia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crane, Stephen.
Maggie, a girl of the streets, and other New York writings / Stephen Crane.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76973-2
1. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. City and town life— Fiction. 3. Slums—Fiction. 4. Poor—Fiction. I. Title.
PS1449.C85 A6 2001 813′.4—dc21 00-048726
Modern Library website address: www.BookishMall.com
v3.1
STEPHEN CRANE
Stephen Townley Crane, the iconoclastic novelist, poet, short-story writer, journalist, and war correspondent who propelled American literature into the modernist age, was born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. The origins of his genius will perhaps always remain elusive: he was of the opinion that “writing was a business like any other” and believed that “one could train one’s mind to observe and a man should be able to say something worthwhile about any event.” Crane’s tragically abbreviated career, which spanned less than ten years, dates from 1892, when the New York Tribune printed the novice reporter’s so-called Sullivan County sketches, a series of rustic stories set in the New York countryside. His first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, was privately printed in 1893 and broke new ground with its realistic portrait of life in the slums of New York City. The Black Riders, a volume of poetry, came out in 1895.
Crane’s next book, The Red Badge of Courage, brought him international fame when it was published in October 1895. “The Red Badge of Courage has long been considered the first great ‘modern’ novel of war by an American—the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism,” wrote Alfred Kazin. “What makes [it] so remarkable, and a pioneer in the literature of war, is that it was written entirely from instinct by a young newspaperman in his early twenties who had never seen a war.”
“With The Red Badge of Courage, Crane burst upon the American public with the effect of a Civil War projectile lain dormant beneath a city square for thirty years,” observed Ralph Ellison. “That The Red Badge was widely read during Crane’s own time was a triumph of his art.”
Afterward Crane led a vagabond existence as a journalist and war correspondent while continuing to write fiction. Capitalizing on the success of The Red Badge of Courage, he turned out The Little Regiment (1896), a collection of Civil War stories. In addition he completed two more novels: George’s Mother (1896), a second Bowery tale often viewed as a companion volume to Maggie, and The Third Violet (1897), a portrait of bohemian life that is generally considered his least accomplished work. Crane’s earlier travels in Mexico and the American Southwest inspired two of his most famous short stories, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1897) and “The Blue Hotel” (1898). His harrowing misadventures at sea en route to Cuba resulted in “The Open Boat” (1897), a story many critics regard as his masterpiece. In 1899, the final year of his life, Crane published War Is Kind, a second book of verse; Active Service, an adventure-romance based on his experiences as a reporter in the Greco-Turkish War; and The Monster and Other Stories, whose disturbing title story provides a sharp study of community malice.
Stephen Crane suffered a series of tubercular hemorrhages while living in England during the spring of 1900 and died in a sanatorium in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900. Several of Crane’s last works were issued posthumously, including Whilomville Stories (1900), a volume of tales about small-town America; Wounds in the Rain (1900), a collection of short stories drawn from his exploits in the Spanish-American War; Great Battles of the World (1901), a work of nonfiction culled from a popular magazine series; Last Words (1902), a miscellany of articles, stories, and newspaper sketches; and The O’Ruddy (1903), a swashbuckling Irish romance left unfinished at the time of his death.
“Crane in his short life quickly showed himself the most original, most ruthlessly independent, most sardonic novelist of his talented generation,” judged Alfred Kazin. “Nowhere in American writing was a godless world expressed with so much terseness and finality as in the work of Stephen Crane.” The poet John Berryman, one of Crane’s most celebrated biographers, concluded: “Crane was perhaps as original as an artist can be, and be valuable.… By a margin he is probably the greatest American story-writer, he stands as an artist not far below Hawthorne and James, he is one of our few poets, and one of the few manifest geniuses the country has produced.”
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION BY LUC SANTE
MAGGIE, A GIRL OF THE STREETS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVII
Chapter XIX
GEORGE’S MOTHER
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
NEW YORK TALES AND SKETCHES
A Great Mistake
An Ominous Baby
A Dark-Brown Dog
The Broken-Down Van
An Experiment in Misery
An Experiment in Luxury
Mr. Binks’ Day Off
Stories Told by an Artist
The Men in the Storm
Coney Island’s Failing Days
The Fire
When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers
New York’s Bicycle Speedway
An Eloquence of Grief
In the Tenderloin: A Duel Between an Alarm Clock and a Suicidal Purpose
The “Tenderloin” As It Really Is
In the “Tenderloin”
Stephen Crane in Minetta Lane
Adventures of a Novelist
NOTE ON THE TEXT
COMMENTARY
READING GROUP GUIDE
INTRODUCTION
Luc Sante
Stephen Crane managed somehow or other to obtain for himself the special condensed edition of life. He was not long past his twentieth birthday when he wrote the first draft of Maggie—“in two days before Christmas,” he claimed. He self-published it (under the pseudonym of Johnson Smith) not long after he turned twenty-one. George’s Mother and two thirds of the stories in this book, as well as The Red Badge of Courage, were written the following year, before he had attained twenty-three.
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