The Portable Stephen Crane

Introduction by Joseph Katz
Notes by Joseph Katz
Look inside
“A man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.” In the course of his tragically abbreviated career, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) saw things that his contemporaries preferred to overlook—the low life of New York’s Irish slums; the tedium, brutality, and chaos that were the true conditions of the Civil War; the ambiguous contract that binds a terrified man to his killer and the damned to their human judges. He communicated what he saw with the same laconic factuality that characterized his journalism and, in the process, laid the foundations for the unblinking realism of Hemingway and Dos Passos.
 
The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer’s vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, and Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including “The Blue Hotel” and “The Open Boat,” a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay “Above All Things”; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.
Introduction
Editor's Note
Crane Chronology
Part One: The World of Maggie
The Maggie Inscription to Hamlin Garland
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Catherine Harris
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
A Great Mistake
An Ominous Baby
A Dark-Brown Dog
George's Mother
The Men in the Storm
An Experiment in Misery
An Experiment in Luxury
Heard on the Street Election Night
Above All Things
Part Two: The World of Henry Fleming
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Mrs. Olive Brett Armstrong
The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War
An Episode of War
The Veteran
Part Three: A World of Shipwreck
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Cora E. Stewart
Stephen Crane's Own Story
Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure
The Open Boat
Part Four: A World of Ironies
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Lily Brandon Monroe
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Willis Brooks Hawkins
Two Letters from Stephen Crane to Nellie Crouse
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
The Five White Mice
The Blue Hotel
The Monster
His New Mittens
The Knife
Part Five: A World in Miniature
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Copeland & Day
A Letter from Stephen Crane to De Morest's Family Magazine
From The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)
From the Uncollected Poems
From War Is Kind (1899)
From the Posthumously PUblished Poems
A Prologue
Stephen Crane was born in 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. He attempted college twice, the second time failing a theme-writing course while writing articles for newspapers such as the New York Tribune. In 1892 Crane moved to the poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Bowery so vividly depicted in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In 1894 the serial publication began of The Red Badge of Courage, his acclaimed and widely popular novel of a young soldier’s coming of age in the Civil War. He died in Germany at the age of twenty-eight, in June of 1900. View titles by Stephen Crane

About

“A man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.” In the course of his tragically abbreviated career, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) saw things that his contemporaries preferred to overlook—the low life of New York’s Irish slums; the tedium, brutality, and chaos that were the true conditions of the Civil War; the ambiguous contract that binds a terrified man to his killer and the damned to their human judges. He communicated what he saw with the same laconic factuality that characterized his journalism and, in the process, laid the foundations for the unblinking realism of Hemingway and Dos Passos.
 
The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer’s vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, and Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including “The Blue Hotel” and “The Open Boat,” a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay “Above All Things”; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Editor's Note
Crane Chronology
Part One: The World of Maggie
The Maggie Inscription to Hamlin Garland
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Catherine Harris
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
A Great Mistake
An Ominous Baby
A Dark-Brown Dog
George's Mother
The Men in the Storm
An Experiment in Misery
An Experiment in Luxury
Heard on the Street Election Night
Above All Things
Part Two: The World of Henry Fleming
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Mrs. Olive Brett Armstrong
The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War
An Episode of War
The Veteran
Part Three: A World of Shipwreck
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Cora E. Stewart
Stephen Crane's Own Story
Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure
The Open Boat
Part Four: A World of Ironies
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Lily Brandon Monroe
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Willis Brooks Hawkins
Two Letters from Stephen Crane to Nellie Crouse
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
The Five White Mice
The Blue Hotel
The Monster
His New Mittens
The Knife
Part Five: A World in Miniature
A Letter from Stephen Crane to Copeland & Day
A Letter from Stephen Crane to De Morest's Family Magazine
From The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)
From the Uncollected Poems
From War Is Kind (1899)
From the Posthumously PUblished Poems
A Prologue

Author

Stephen Crane was born in 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. He attempted college twice, the second time failing a theme-writing course while writing articles for newspapers such as the New York Tribune. In 1892 Crane moved to the poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Bowery so vividly depicted in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In 1894 the serial publication began of The Red Badge of Courage, his acclaimed and widely popular novel of a young soldier’s coming of age in the Civil War. He died in Germany at the age of twenty-eight, in June of 1900. View titles by Stephen Crane