A LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane. With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death. In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of reading experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.

Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—is surrounded by myths, distortions, and fabrications. Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most accurate account of the poet and novelist to date.

A depiction of the American Civil War. It features a young recruit who overcomes initial fears to become a hero on the battlefield.

This is the only biography by a leading American poet of the great American writer, Stephen Crane. John Berryman originally wrote this book in 1950 for the distinguished "American Men of Letters" series, and revised it twelve years later. This edition reproduces the later version. In Stephen Crane, Berryman assesses the writings and life of a man whose work has been one of the most powerful influences on modern writers. As Edmund Wilson said in The New Yorker, "Mr. Berryman's work is an important one, and not merely because at the moment it stands alone...We are not likely soon to get anything better on the critical and psychological sides." It is Berryman's special insight into Crane as a poet that makes this book unique.

Crane's complete novels are accompanied by his poetry and, arranged by place and time, his short stories, sketches and newspaper articles.

This collection offers the complete poems of Stephen Crane (1871 - 1900), as well as essays on him by Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather. One of the best short story writers of all time, Crane was also an important poet who established laconic precision as the dominant style of free verse. His followers included such authors as Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings. Without any doubt, Crane should be regarded as the father of modern-days' literary minimalism.