The first social expose in fiction to render 'how the other half lives,' Stephen Crane's "Maggie" is one of the most powerful depictions of the urban poor of its time. As a reviewer stated shortly after the work's appearance in 1893: '"Maggie" is a study of life in the slums of New York, and of the hopeless struggle of a girl against the horrible conditions of her environment; and so bitter is the struggle, so black the environment, so inevitable is the end, that the reader feels a chill at his heart'.
STEPHEN CRANE was born, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. Writ-ing was an occupation encouraged in Crane's family; two of his brothers became newspapermen. Crane himself began turning out stories at the age of eight. In 1890, following the deaths of both parents, Crane moved to New York City where, to support himself, he worked as a freelance newspaper writer. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which Crane had begun at college, was published pseudonymously in 1893, when he was only twenty-one (Crane had had to borrow money from his brother to pay for its initial printing). Reviewers at the time found Maggie, a penetrating look at New York slum life, "too cruel," and the book sold poorly. Crane's first literary success came in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage. Crane's travels and experiences during the later 1890s as a war correspondent -- he was sent to the combat areas of Mex-ico, Greece, and Cuba -- furnished rich material for other sto-ries, including "The Open Boat" (based partly on Crane's own experience of shipwreck off the coast of Florida) and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," whose blend of realism and romanticism earned the praise of William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and other American realists. Crane also published two volumes of poetry, The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), which dramatized his rebellion against New England Calvinism and conservative evangelical Christianity. Spumed or ignored by the critics of his own country, Crane traveled with his wife-to--be to England, where The Red Badge of Courage was greatly admired, and where he made the acquaintance of such literary giants as Henry James (another American emigre) and Joseph Conrad. Crane's adventuresome and roving lifestyle seriously under-mined his health; after fruitless efforts to obtain a cure, he died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight. Stephen Crane published other novels and several vol-umes of short stories, including George's Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1897), The Monster and Other Stories (1899), and Whilomville Stories (1900).
