Like Anderson, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, he dramatized the powers of illusion to shape events and destinies. He does, indeed, seem closer to these writers in manner and spirit than to the writers of his own day.
The experience which contributed most importantly to the shaping of Crane's modernist ideas and attitude was probably his early life as a minister's son. He was born 1 November 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, the last of fourteen children of the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Townley Crane, a well-known Methodist clergyman, and Mary Helen Peck Crane. Mrs. Crane, a descendant of a long line of Methodist preachers "of the old ambling-nag, saddle-bag, exhorting kind" (as Crane once described them), was active in church and reform work, serving at one time as an officer in the New Jersey Women's Christian Temperance Union. She was also, like her husband, interested in fiction. Dr. Crane wrote several moralistic little fables for a Methodist Sunday school paper, and Mrs. Crane, as it has been recently discovered, wrote at least two stories in the early or mid eighties for the Monmouth (New Jersey) Tribune.
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