Crane, Stephen

(US, 1871–1900)

The son of a preacher, Stephen Crane quickly rejected middle-class life in favour of baseball, pool, poker, and ‘unsuitable’ relationships. After a turbulent spell at college he became a journalist, chronicling both the poverty-stricken underside of America's expanding cities and the Spanish-American and Graeco-Turkish wars. Poverty and war dominated his fiction. In his early novellas, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) and George's Mother (1896), he used highly charged language to explore the moral and psychological effects of life in a New York tenement block. His masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), is set on the battlefields of the American Civil War, and re-creates the experiences of a young soldier, Henry Fleming. This remarkable book, which rewards careful reading, is both a powerful war story and a probing exploration of sensation and consciousness. Crane's story ‘The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’ (1898) is an early classic of the Western genre.

Upton Sinclair, Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Conrad. See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WAR, WESTERN  BH