Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, the last of fourteen children to Jonathan and Mary. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother was an active member of the church and reform work, including the temperance movement. Crane's upbringing in this religious household profoundly influenced his own worldview, which he eloquently expressed in his works. James B. Colvert, in his article for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes that Crane's poetry especially reflects "the anguish of a spiritual crisis in which he attempted to exorcise the Pecks' God of wrath and, beyond that, to test his faith in general against the moral realities" of the 1890s, which he recorded during his years as a reporter. His religious questioning was a primary subject in much of his fiction.

Crane began his career as a newspaper reporter after his father died and the...