Stephen Crane

Crane, Stephen (1871–1900), U.S. author. He wrote one of the earliest of naturalist novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the story of a prostitute driven to despair. Although Crane's short poems anticipated the modern style and he wrote some fine short stories, like “The Open Boat” (1898), he is best known for his fiction, and particularly for The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a sensitive study of a soldier during the Civil War that conveys the confusion and fear of battle and the vastness of the conflict. Crane himself had never seen war, but he went on to work as a journalist in New York and then actually became a war correspondent before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 28.