Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died, at the age of thirty, he had ten printed volumes standing to his credit, two more announced for publication, and two others which were appearing serially.

Crane’s most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was written when he was twenty-two years old. What is even more astonishing is the fact that this detailed description of blood and battlefields was written by a civilian far from the scene of conflict. This novel (Crane’s second) was an instantaneous and international success. The Atlantic Monthly pronounced it “great enough to set a new fashion in literature”; H. G. Wells, speaking of its influence in England, said Crane was “the first expression of the opening mind or a new period ... a record of an intensity beyond all precedent.”

Crane’s other books, although less powerful than The Red Badge of Courage, are scarcely less vivid. The Open Boat (1898) and The Monster (1899) are full of an intuitive wisdom and a sensitivity that caused Wells to exclaim “The man who can call these ‘brilliant fragments’ would reproach Rodin for not ‘completing’ his fragments.”

At various periods in Crane’s brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines, a new acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), lines that strangely anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later.

Besides his many novels, short stories and poems, Crane was writing, at the time of his death, descriptions of the world’s great battles for Lippincott’s Magazine; his droll Whilomville Stories for boys were appearing in Harper’s Monthly and he was beginning a series of similar stories for girls. It is more than probable that this feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that caused Crane’s death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey’s end, June 5, 1900.