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 wellknown 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. Her uncle, the Reverend Jesse Peck, a Methodist bishop and one of the founders of Syracuse University, was the author of a minatory religious treatise "redolent with the fumes of sulphur and brimstone," What Must I Do to Be Saved" (1858), a copy of which Stephen Crane inherited from his father in 1881.
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