Most inhabitants weren’t recent immigrants struggling to adjust, but treadmill-bound victims of compounded hopelessness and inertia. They might live in the same dumps and drink in the same deadfalls as their parents or grandparents before them. The Bowery, meanwhile, was the great clearinghouse that drew from all over the country thrill-seekers, lamsters, tramps, barflies, outcasts, predators, margin-players, smalltime showbiz personalities, people with unconventional or unmarketable ambitions, people who knew nothing except how to hang out. The two spheres were distinct, although they blurred together in the popular mind. They were downtown, they were poor and vicious and uncultured and base, and that was all most people needed to know.

Soon after arriving, Crane thought the Bowery was “the only interesting place in New York,” and a difference of opinion on the subject busted up one of his earliest serious romances. As the youngest son of a financially uncertain clerical family, he could not be said to be slumming, exactly, and he doesn’t really seem like one of those writer types who go places merely to prospect for material. Rather, Crane throughout his life was interested in things that puzzled him, things that were off-kilter in human terms. He had to throw himself into the Bowery in order to dope it out, in the phrase of the time. After he had done so, he commented regarding “An Experiment in Misery” that “the root of Bowery life is a sort of cowardice. Perhaps I mean a lack of ambition or to willingly be knocked flat and accept the licking.” This should not be interpreted as contempt, but it did settle the matter for him.

The Lower East Side posed a different sort of problem. Maggie is a study in tragic inevitability—Howells called it “Greek”—and that sort of thing was to go on fascinating him. It is also romantic, as John Berryman points out in his book on Crane. Maggie herself is fitted out for a kind of sainthood (even as her martyrdom seems to anticipate the judgment levied upon her opposite, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, who meets Jack the Ripper). Crane treated the Bowery sociologically, and Maggie may have begun as an inquiry along those lines, but Crane was pulled by tides of emotion toward the specific and the archetypal. In any case, it didn’t go over with the wider public. Although copies got to Howells and Hamlin Garland and a few other writers who immediately understood, the original pseudonymous edition sold exactly two copies in the only bookstore that would handle it. After the triumph of The Red Badge of Courage, critics started to notice it, but they still didn’t like it much. It was raw, uncouth, red (to employ Crane’s favorite adjective). It was perceived as obscene, or close to it, and in 1896 Crane actually abetted a bowdlerized edition (which also incorporated his own revisions) that tamed the interjections and drew a discreet veil over the circumstances of Maggie’s end. For half a century Maggie stood among the unknown American classics.

A few of the stories herein are stories, at least one of them (“A Dark Brown Dog”) an anthology standard, and deservedly so. The rest are examples of what Crane thought of as reporting. Crane spent much of his brief writing life in the employ of newspapers and magazines, but such employments often ended unhappily. Thomas Beer again: “He could not report. Apparently he did not even try to report. Of what use to any newspaper was an impression of impatient horses kicking ‘grey ice of the gutter into silvery angles that hurtled and clicked on frozen stone’ when the boy had been sent to get the facts of a large and important fire?” Newspapers then had a lot more room for impressions, fancies, and word-pictures than they do today, but even so there were limits, which Crane habitually overstepped. You’d be hard pressed to find a single ephemeral fact or number in any of his pieces. He was hardly ignorant of what was required, but he couldn’t help himself. For him, writing meant noticing certain kinds of marginal details that cut openings through to the emotional center of his subject, and language was a color wheel. It is always embarrassing to get mystical about literature, but there is little question that Crane was a votary, a practitioner of some witchcraft that defied calculation and often conventional better judgment. As he himself put it, memorably, “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways and every artist must be in some things powerless as a dead snake.”

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LUC SANTE is the author of Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts.