Crane, Stephen (1871–1900)

US writer and poet who introduced grim realism into the US novel. His book The Red Badge of Courage (1895) deals vividly with the US Civil War in a prose of Impressionist, visionary naturalism.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, he moved to the tenements of New York City in 1892 to work as a journalist. There he wrote his naturalistic fables of urban misery, the self-published ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York’ (1893), which was rejected by many editors because of its shocking subject matter. He travelled widely as a war correspondent in Mexico, Greece, and Cuba, the latter assignment inspiring one of his most acclaimed stories, ‘The Open Boat’ (1897), an account of a shipwreck that dramatizes man's exposure to indifferent nature. In 1898 he settled in England where he became friends with several important writers including Joseph Conrad. He also published two volumes of poetry: The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899).