Stephen (Townley) Crane Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Stephen (Townley) Crane

Author at twenty-one of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the first naturalistic novel of American slum life, and at twenty-four of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), an American classic which catapulted him to literary fame, Stephen Crane wrote four additional novels, more than a hundred short stories (including "The Blue Hotel," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and "The Open Boat"), and close to a thousand pages of journalism and sketches (including innumerable war reports, among them "Marines Signalling Under Fire at Guantanamo" and the perhaps fictional"The Upturned Face") before his death at the age of twenty-eight. In contrast, his output in verse was small. Crane had neither a sustained poetic career nor any apparent desire for one. There are 136 poems in the University of Virginia edition of his works--barely 1,800 lines; "mind you, I never call them poems myself," he wrote Nellie Crouse in January 1896; instead, he called them "lines" or "pills." Yet in 1926 Amy Lowell called him "historically an important link in the chain of American poetry"; Edith Wyatt in 1915 praised his "power of direct treatment" as "an art absent even from the aim of most of the poems the Imagists themselves regard as their most distinctive work." According to Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound is supposed to have "somewhere spoken of him appreciatively," and John Berryman in 1950 called him "the important American poet between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson on one side and his tardy-developing contemporaries Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost with Ezra Pound on the other."

The poetry is also, however, enigmatic.

Read the rest of this Biography with our Stephen (Townley) Crane Access Pass.