Volume 11, Number 10 · December 5, 1968
Stephen Crane, Inc.
By Alfred Kazin
Stephen Crane: A Biography
by R.W. Stallman
George Braziller, 664 pp., $12.50
When Thomas Beer was working on the first biography of Stephen Crane (1923), his publisher engaged a detective agency to help him in his research. Crane, though not yet twenty-nine when he died in 1900, had traveled fast and hard from the New Jersey parsonage in which he had been born, had been in many scrapes, had reported everything from the Bowery to the Greek-Turkish War and the Spanish-American War, had loved many women, had been admired by several first-class writers. There were an extraordinary number of people in his short life, many of whom had tales to tell. There were a lot of secrets; and Crane himself was the biggest secret of all, for he was easy to meet, he put himself on record as the most direct and straightforward of honest American fellows, but there was no clear path between this character and his genius.
Review, 2843 words
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