His formal education ended after one semester at Syracuse University, where he was known on campus for his baseball skills. Despite his unimpressive academic performance, he wrote regularly while he was a student.

Stephen Crane became a prolific writer—of journalism and novels, short stories and poetry. By age twenty-three he had completed two major novels marked by an impressionism and a psychological realism that anticipated the “new fiction” of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. His writing of fiction is informed by the keen, precise observation that also made him a journalist; for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), he shadowed a New York prostitute for weeks. Crane was born after the Civil War, and he relied on secondary sources and his own intuition and emotional insights in creating The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the story of a young recruit’s experiences during one key battle. The book is often cited as the first modern novel.

While on assignment to cover the Cuban-Spanish conflict that preceded the Spanish-American war, Crane met his lifelong companion, Cora Stewart, a well-read daughter of old money who owned a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida. Crane and Stewart later lived in England, where they socialized with Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, who admired Crane’s unique writing style. The young American continued to publish novels, stories, and articles for journals, which solidified his reputation.

Illness cut Crane’s life short. In 1899, in Badenweiler, Germany, he collapsed with severe hemorrhaging of the lungs brought on by tuberculosis and malaria. He died in a sanitarium on June 5, 1900, five months before his twenty-ninth birthday.

In his short but brilliant career, Stephen Crane produced six novels, two collections of poetry, and more than one hundred stories, which were compiled in a ten-volume edition published by the University Press of Virginia (1969-1976). He is remembered as a pioneering writer who anticipated the styles that modernized American literature in the 1920s.

THE WORLD OF STEPHEN CRANE AND HIS WRITINGS ABOUT NEW YORK


1871   Stephen Crane is born on November 1 at 14 Mulberry Street, Newark, New Jersey, the last of his parents’ fourteen children. 
1878   Stephen enrolls in school. His father becomes pastor of the Drew Methodist Church in Port Jervis, in upstate New York. 
1880   Stephen’s father dies of heart failure. 
1883   Stephen and his mother move to Asbury Park, a town on the New Jersey coast. 
1885   Concerned about Stephen’s digressions from Methodist teachings , his mother enrolls him at Pennington Seminary, a school where his father had once been the principal. He writes his first story, “Uncle Jake and the Bell-Handle.” Stephen becomes intrigued by the battles of the Civil War and decides to pursue a career in the army. 
1888   In January, Stephen enrolls at the Hudson River Institute, a semi-military school in upstate Claverack, New York. He works as a gossip reporter for his brother Townley’s news agency; his vignettes appear in “On the Jersey Coast,” a column in Townley’s New York Tribune. 
1890   In February, Stephen’s first signed publication, an essay on the Christian virtues of Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s African expedition , appears in the school magazine. In September, he enrolls at Lafayette College, in Pennsylvania, to pursue a more practical profession, mining engineering. He does poorly in his studies and fails a course in theme writing. After one semester, he withdraws from Lafayette. Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed, serialized in Lippincott’s magazine, inspires Stephen to develop his own style of writing. How the Other Half Lives,  Jacob Riis’s groundbreaking expose of the sordid living conditions of New York City’s tenement dwellers, is published.

1891   Stephen’s mother enrolls him as a “special student” in the Scientific Course at Syracuse University, where she hopes he will be influenced by the school’s strict Methodist codes. He joins the baseball team and transfers his Delta Upsilon fraternity membership from Lafayette. He continues to write for the New York Tribune and publishes a story, “The King’s Favor,” in the University Herald, the Syracuse literary magazine. In June, Stephen leaves Syracuse and joins the Tribune  as a seasonal reporter In August, he meets Hamlin Garland, a radical-minded young writer and critic from Boston, after he writes a review of Garland’s lecture on William Dean Howells at Avon-by-theSea , New Jersey. Garland will have a profound influence on Stephen’s development as a writer.
1892   In July, five of Stephen Crane’s anecdotal stories about his camping and fishing trips in Sullivan County, New York, are published in the Tribune. He is dismissed from his job when his report of a parade of workers in Asbury Park embarrasses Whitelaw Reid, the Tribune’s owner and a U.S. vice presidential candidate. In the fall, Crane moves to New York to work for the Herald. 
1893  Maggie is published at Crane’s expense, under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The novel catches the eye of Garland and William Dean Howells, both literary realists, who befriend Crane. In April, Crane begins to write The Red Badge of Courage. 
1894   In late February, Crane and a friend dress in rags, wait in a bread line, and spend the night in a flophouse—experiences that inspire the stories “An Experiment in Misery” and “The Men in the Storm”; these pieces are published in the New York Press and The Arena, respectively. In the spring, Crane begins another New York novel, George’s Mother. An abridged version of The Red Badge of Courage  is published in the Philadelphia Press and other newspapers in December. Crane writes “A Night at the Millionaire’s Club,” a mocking dig at the snobbish club members.
1895   He tours the American West and Mexico as a roving reporter for the Bacheller-Johnson Syndicate.