As one of his champions, Amy Levenell observed: “He disbelieved it and he hated it, but he could not free himself of it.”

Still, somehow he managed to tamp down the fires of self-damnation. He was not far into his teenage years when he made his first stabs at bohemianism. At a semi-military prep school in Claverack, New York, he was said to be given to outlandish dress, was “giftedly profane,” and made his contempt for authority quite obvious. Cadet Crane did not make it through a single year at the academy.

At Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, he began to read widely—not the required texts, but contemporary literature, particularly Flaubert and Tolstoy, authors still a generation away from the curriculum of a small American liberal-arts college. He repeatedly voiced profound opinions on these writers and on any other matters of the day. The brief experience at Lafayette College was succeeded by a stint at Syracuse University. It was at Syracuse that Crane developed a taste for the slums and the police courts—a curiosity that would stay with him throughout his brief life.

It was darkly bruited about at Syracuse that the colorful Stephen Crane was writing a scandalous novel about a prostitute. Legend has it that he started the book as early as sixteen years of age, but surely that would have been too young, even for someone as precocious as Stephen Crane. Most scholars of Crane’s works agree that he began the book at nineteen years of age, during his only semester at Syracuse University.

During his short professional life Crane traveled the world. He became an habitué of literary salons in Europe, covered wars in the Balkans, Mexico, and Cuba, and wandered the more remote corners of the western United States. But it was always in New York City that he found his métier; it was in the city that he was most at home. After Syracuse University, and a predictably brief stint on a suburban New Jersey newspaper, Crane gravitated to New York, the place that would shape his work, and, as a consequence, subsequent American letters.

Crane was determined to live in the city and to make his living with his pen. Living a bohemian, hand-to-mouth existence, he took to vanishing into the vast netherworld of the city, living among the whores, the drunks, the drug addicts, and the “b’hoys,” the Irish gangster swells of the Bowery. Emerging from this underworld, Crane would have enough material for a freelance newspaper piece as well as other material that would become Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Occasional newspaper work, a small but providential inheritance, and regular handouts from one of his brothers allowed Crane to cobble together a modest living—but it was Maggie on which he had pinned his hopes.

By 1892 Crane had finished writing Maggie. He approached the editor of Century Magazine, hoping his story would be serialized in the pages of that august publication. Almost immediately his hopes were dashed. The editor found the manuscript “cruel” and far too straightforward about the awful details of slum life. At the time there was no shortage of literature about the life of the underclass, but it was always couched in the safe terms of moral disapproval, sugar-coating the misery of the wretched, and suggesting that somehow the poor were responsible for their misery. Crane’s matter-of-fact presentation of life in the gutter was, the editor of the Century felt, too harsh for its middle- and upper-class readership.

Crane then began that dispiriting trek, so well known to first-time novelists, traveling from publisher to publisher only to have his manuscript rejected again and again. Many of the editors who read Maggie had the same opinion: While there was much to admire in the book, the squalor of the story, the appalling degradation of virtually all the characters, and the coarseness of the language were bound to outrage the “Mrs. Grundys” of the world (the fictional Mrs. Grundy, introduced in Thomas Morton’s 1798 play Speed the Plow, exemplifies the negative influence of conventional wisdom) and bring nothing but opprobrium down on the author and by extension his publisher.

Crane then came up with the idea of publishing his book under a pseudonym, and he chose the bland, almost forgettable name of “Johnston Smith.” “You see,” he explained, “I was going to wait until the world was pyrotechnic about Johnston Smith’s Maggie and then I was going to flop down like a trapeze performer from a wire, coming forward with all the grace of a consumptive hen, and say ‘I am he, friends’ ” (Stallman, Stephen Crane, p. 69; see “For Further Reading”).

That Crane set out to épater les bourgeois—outrage the middle class—there can be little doubt. However, the intentionally scandalous nature of the book still left him with the problem of finding a publisher—a problem that seemed insurmountable. Following rejection after rejection, Crane was forced to suffer the ignominy of publishing the work himself, paying a house best known for medical texts and religious tracts to print the first edition of Maggie. In 1893 he paid $869 for 1,100 copies of a cheap-looking yellow paperback edition of the book. Johnston Smith, however, had ceased to exist—Stephen Crane’s name appears on the title page. The publisher’s name appears nowhere. Even under the canopy of anonymity the publisher had insisted that the manuscript be bowdlerized to a degree. Some of the rougher language and more violent scenes were removed or toned down. But Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was still pretty strong meat for its day, and Crane now waited (one senses with a degree of gleeful anticipation) for the hue and cry, the fierce literary arguments, the denunciations from the pulpits of every denomination, that would propel Maggie to best-sellerdom and make the young man’s fortune.

Instead, silence.