Thereafter, he wrote two more short novels (and began several others), wrote numerous short stories and pieces of reportage, traveled in the West and down to Mexico, covered the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War for Pulitzer and Hearst, moved to a baronial manor in England, and came down with tuberculosis, which killed him when he was twenty-eight. It may have been a short life, but it was a full one, conducted at three or four times the normal speed.

Prior to Maggie, he hardly had an apprenticeship: a handful of sketches at most. He had thrown over higher education after a semester apiece at two institutions. He was an orphan, his mother having just died and his father when he was eight. He lived variously: with brothers in New Jersey and in Sullivan County, New York, and in New York City in sundry ad hoc arrangements with artists his age, most often so poor they burned furniture for fuel and ate randomly. He zipped back and forth among domiciles, not seeming to spend more than two consecutive weeks in any one spot. The material for Maggie was undoubtedly drawn in part from his experiences of people from childhood onward, but the aspects specific to New York City he had absorbed in a matter of no more than three months before writing the first draft, since he arrived in the city in September and wrote the thing in December. He was a kid. His last years were studded with names; people like Joseph Conrad and Henry James were friends and neighbors. At the time of Maggie, however, he was a strange, impulsive, prodigious adolescent, half-silent and half-wild. The old men who published their memories of him in the 1930s or talked to his first biographer, Thomas Beer, in the previous decade remembered him in kid terms. One man, for example, recalled reading Maggie chapter by chapter “in a house over on the far East Side, where he lived with a crowd of irresponsibles.” Translate this to the contemporary equivalent of your choice.

Being a kid gave him a number of advantages of stance. He could presume, for one thing, to understand the hearts of matters he had barely glimpsed—and this aspect looms largest in the clairvoyance of The Red Badge of Courage, which many war veterans were certain had to have been written by another war veteran. He could also overlook decorum, or, maybe, be innocent of it altogether. In the early 1890s, Realism was a sort of continental pornography; Zola was bought, more or less under the counter, by thrill-seeking schoolboys (not Crane, though, who didn’t much like Zola). A homegrown Realism, employing the American slums as its focus and subject, simply didn’t exist. The slums themselves were only just beginning to be discussed in a serious way, and then by reformers and crusaders—Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives had just come out, in 1890. Everything else lay in the future. The popular novelist Edward Townsend (Chimmie Fadden and A Daughter of the Tenements, both 1895), a friend of Crane’s, virtually made a career of elaborating and sentimentalizing aspects of Maggie. Riis’s fiction appears like so many banalizations of the “baby” tales herein, although there is no evidence he ever read Crane. Almost anything else of literary significance written about the Bowery and the Lower East Side, by Hutchins Hapgood, Rupert Hughes, James Huneker, Alfred Henry Lewis, even O. Henry, was published after 1900, after Crane’s death.

It’s not, of course, as if the New York slums lay beneath notice. Harper’s and the other illustrated papers regularly sent reporters and sketch artists to do local-color items. The Police Gazette, which treated the Bowery as its private turf and made minor stars of its more notable loungers, was standard-issue reading in every barbershop in the country. The local accent and mannerisms were familiar nationwide from being relentlessly reproduced for laughs on the vaudeville stage. (Thomas Beer: “The Bowery language was humorous, as are a dozen dialects in which the fierce, defensive cynicism of the illiterate American takes on color and shape. There was a choppy rhythm in the speech from which the sound of th had been taken away. Many vowels were washed over so briskly that it took experience to tell whether they had been pronounced at all by some hasty group of lads hanging for a breath together while the policeman’s back was turned.”) All these avenues, however, fell below the level of art, which at the time was still supposed not only to be refined, but to concern itself exclusively with refined subjects. William Dean Howells, who was to champion Crane just as he championed nearly every worthwhile American writer of the era, had a character in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) wonder why it was that painters could see the beauty of a bustling slum thoroughfare if they happened upon it in Naples but overlook the same thing in New York, and Crane himself thought of genre painting (“Street Scene in Cairo”) among the alleys of Coney Island. But such depictions would have to wait for the twentieth century and the Ashcan School.

The Lower East Side, then, before the great waves of immigration from Eastern Europe and Italy, was still largely Irish in ancestry and nurtured a lumpenproletarian style and customs in dissolution and vassalage that had been refined over a century.