Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was the youngest of fourteen born in 1871 to a Methodist minister in New Jersey. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), was not a commercial success and kept Crane working as a slum reporter. It was The Red Badge of Courage (1895) that earned widespread acclaim. Crane was twenty-eight when he died from tuberculosis, and his brief energetic life brought great innovations to modern fiction. Symbolic rather than graphic realism and an interest in psychological probing have their beginnings in Crane’s work, well illustrated in this 1899 short story, “The Blue Hotel.”