SOURCE: "Brander Matthew's Re-visioning of Crane's Maggie," in American Literature, Vol. 60, No. 4, December, 1988, pp. 654-8.

In this essay, Oliver contrasts Matthews' version of Realism with Stephen Crane's by comparing Matthews' short story "Before the Break of Day" with Crane's short novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

Reviewing Stephen Crane's Maggie, Hamlin Garland praised the novella as the most truthful and unhackneyed tale of the slums he had ever read, but he qualified his praise of Crane's compelling study in naturalism by contending that it "is only a fragment. It is typical only of the worst elements of the alley. The author should delineate the families living on the next street, who live lives of heroic purity and hopeless hardship."¹ Garland's critique of Maggie will be familiar to most Crane scholars; less known, however, is the fact that two months before his review appeared, Garland, apparently intending to...