Crane the man is enigmatic, but the artist survives in his work and is approachable when the man, lost in the past and in legend, is not.
Crane was born on 1 November 1871, a close contemporary of W. E. B. Du Bois, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Frank Norris, and Jack London. He was descended on both sides from clergymen, and through his father from a Revolutionary patriot, Stephen Crane, president of the Colonial Assemblies. The former circumstance helps to explain his religious symbolism and the anguish of his agnosticism; the latter illuminates his paradoxical combination of aristocratic attitudes with empathy for the lapsed, those who fail to live up to received standards or a more heroic past. Crane's father, the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Townley Crane, was Presiding Elder of Methodist churches in and around Newark; his mother, Mary Peck Crane, was an active public speaker on religious and reform issues. A man of liberal inclinations and charity, Jonathan Crane was a beloved presence in his small world; his death early in 1880 put the family of nine surviving children (five others had died in early childhood) in straitened circumstances and left Stephen, his youngest son, with an unstable personal identity.
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