A comprehensive anthology of the 112 short stories and sketches of the 19th century American author.

This is a full-length study of Crane's short stories, tracing their formal development and relating Crane's work to the aesthetic principles of American modernism. As mirrors of his time, Crane's stories reflected the major forces that transformed American life between 1850 and 1900: the Civil War, industrialism and the rise of cities and slums, and the disappearance of the American frontier. Consequently, the predominant theme of much of Crane's work is the conflict between chaos and order, emphasizing what Crane saw as man's fragmented perception of reality. In his search for meaning in human existence, Crane turned to ritual in his late fiction. ISBN 0-8057-8315-6: $18.95.

“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fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay “Above All Things”; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

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.

Incorporating and synthesizing material unknown to previous biographers or inadequately utilized by them, this comprehensive and reliable source on Crane's brief life is divided chronologically, starting with the author's youth in New Jersey to his college years at Syracuse U., his years in New York City, and his years as a correspondent in Mexico, Greece, England, and Cuba. Includes numerous illustrations, brief biographies of significant people in Crane's life, and detailed source notes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR