Volume 36, Number 4 · March 16, 1989
The Courage of Stephen Crane
By Christopher Benfey
Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry
edited by J.C. Levenson
The Library of America, 1,379 pp., $27.50
The Correspondence of Stephen Crane
edited by Stanley Wertheim, edited by Paul Sorrentino
Columbia University Press, 2 volumes, 772 pp., $75.00
Stephen Crane was twenty-three in the fall of 1895, when The Red Badge of Courage was published. An impoverished newspaper reporter living in New York, Crane watched the machinery of fame that had been perfected by his bosses Pulitzer and Hearst go to work for him. There was some grumbling from the New York press (an army general, writing in The Dial, accused the British of liking the Civil War novel because its hero was a deserter from the Union Army), but The Red Badge was well received in the US and English critics indulged in what H.G. Wells called an 'orgy of praise.' During the next few years Crane worked as a journalist in New York and he wrote some now forgotten novels. He recovered the intensity of The Red Badge of Courage only in a dozen superb short stories. 'People may just as well discover now,' he complained in 1896, 'that the high dramatic key of The Red Badge cannot be sustained.' Four years later, exhausted from covering the Spanish-American War and claiming to be 'disappointed with success,' Crane died of tuberculosis in a sanitarium in the Black Forest. He was twenty-eight.
Review, 4060 words
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