Stephen Crane

Born November 1, 1871, Stephen Crane was the youngest of fourteen children. Despite the influence of his Methodist minister father, Crane rejected religion. (His atheistic worldview can be seen clearly in his most famous work, “The Open Boat,” with its discussion of fate’s randomness and references to mythology.) Crane lived most of his life as a starving artist, working as a journalist and author and living in run-down apartments with his friends. He dropped out of Syracuse University after only one semester, deciding instead to follow his passion for journalism to New York City. In 1893, he used his own meager finances to publish his first book, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York), but it didn’t sell many copies. He had more success in 1895 with his second work, The Red Badge of Courage. After publishing this book, Crane was hired as a reporter, which also allowed him to collect material for his own stories. Crane left New York City in the winter of 1896, after an incident with the New York police involving a prostitute. He went to Jacksonville, Florida, where he boarded a ship called The Commodore with intention of going to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. The ship sank the following day, on January 2, 1897, but Crane made it back to shore in a small lifeboat with three others. A few days later, the New York Press published Crane’s account of the ship’s sinking, but only two paragraphs touched on his experience in the lifeboat. Five months later, however, Crane published “The Open Boat”—a fictional short story based on his experience as a shipwreck survivor on the open sea. Crane went on to live in England with his partner, Cora Crane (Cora Howorth Taylor), where he penned an extraordinary number of poems, short stories, articles, and novels. In deep debt and rapidly deteriorating health due to tuberculosis, Crane died on June 5, 1900 at the age of twenty-eight.