Stephen Crane is a master of creating well-known realistic scenes of combat and death. Crane was a poor writer, that created some of the greatest novels of all times. Although he lived a short life, he made sure he made something of it. Stephen was a courageous, anti war writer. He used a lot of irony and descriptive pieces in his stories which were influenced by poverty.
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1891. Crane was the youngest in a family of fourteen. He was among the first writers to rebel against the genteel tradition, with his false romanticism and repression. Crane and some of his contemporaries were learning to mistrust what society had taught and accepted. “Let a thing become a tradition and it becomes half a lie”(Sufrin 5). His desire to write was inspired by his family. In almost three years of poverty, Crane had written four impressive, highly original books: “Maggie,” “The Black Riders,” “The Red Badge of Courage,” and “George’s Mother.” Stephen Crane started out as a comic writer. One of his techniques, which informs all about his best stories and novels, was parody. Crane’s poetry, for the most part, was dedicated to the metaphysical problems raised by man’s relation to his god. His fiction on the other hand, portrayed man struggling to survive in the society. The controlling tone in Crane’s fiction was humorous, ironic,serious, and self conscious. Crane began his higher education in 1888 at Hudson River Institute and Claverack College, a military school which nurtured his interest in “The Red Badge of Courage.” At the end of the first semester Cranes had only received four out of his seven classes, and two of them were failing grades. The other three were not graded because he never attended the...
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...play I seem to feel, underneath the mirth and nonsense, a terrible hatred of mass opinion, a fervent faith in the individual's right to live”(Garland 56). “One of America’s most influential writers, Stephen Crane, produced works that have been credited with establishing the foundations of modern American naturalism. His civil war novel, “The Red Badge of Courage,” realistically depicts the psychological complexities of battlefield emotion and has become a classic of American Literature”(“Stephen Crane”
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“At the end of Stephen Crane’s life, literally on his deathbed, he returned to straight parody”(Soloman 12). Crane lived his life in poverty but that didn't stop him from writing. He was a courageous man and his life was strictly about writing. Such an approach to Stephen Crane’s fiction may make him appear to be a negative artist, a critic rather that a creator.
The Red Badge of Courage and The Blue Hotel: The Singular Love of Stephen Crane
In the novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction by Stephen Crane, Crane tells a story about Maggie, a girl who lives in the slums of New York City in the 1800s with her family and friends. In novella it is portrayed that Maggie desperately tries to escape the slums, however, because of Maggie’s environment and social forces, it ultimately led to her downfall and demise within society.
Schroeder, John W. "Stephen Crane Embattled," University of Kansas City Review, XVII (Winter 1950), 119 Rpt. in
Crane's story is about a girl named Maggie who grew up in a life that would cause any person with feelings to have the utmost sympathy for her. To explain briefly; her brother was a roughneck in the community, her mother and father were alcoholics, a younger brother died at a young age, and they lived in a tenement building. Crane is described as a "realistic" author because of the way he describes the social environment and the stress of everyday life.
Beaver, Harold. "Stephen Crane: The Hero as Victim." Modern Critical Interpretations: Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 65-74.
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage is a Civil War novel written in 1895. The novel tells the story of a young soldier who flees from the war, and subsequently is afflicted by mental anguish. Though the novel may be centered around the Civil War, the real war revolves around this anguish occurs in Henry’s head. From the onset of the novel, the protagonist tries hard to reconcile the mythological stories of past heroes arising from glorious battles with the ordinary and much less exalted experiences of his regiment. When presented with the knowledge that he may be moved to the front lines, Henry begins to deliberate over the war and glory he envisioned with the reality of the situation he is now in, and wonders if he’ll return ‘with his
When reading any of Edgar Allen Poe’s works, the reader can almost expect a reoccurring theme that focuses on the questionable sanity of the narrator and the overwhelming presence of death that drives the story to its resolve. The two stories being compared are no exception to this theme as both are built upon the thought driven narrative of a seemingly mad man with a fervor for revenge. In both stories the reader is told of the main character, “The Cask of Amontillado” gives us Montresor and “The Tell-Tale Heart” is simply the narrator of the story, who seek out a character to murder for vague reasons not fully explained to the reader in a way that builds a picture of the way their mind works. As both dictate how and why they plan to commit their crimes, the inner monologue that is provided by a first person narrative paints a picture of the unstable emotional state and irrational thought process that gives the reader insight to how unreliable their account of the story actually is. This unreliable narrative leaves the story open to interpretation on whether or not the act of murder was committed righteously, or simply just the misguided actions of two insane characters.
The descriptions of war that he read in magazines were usually dry and too matter-of-fact. He also believed that they lacked connection to the real emotions that are brought about by warfare; “dates and locations of battles cannot even begin to reproduce the essence of combat” (“Naturalism”). Due to his yearning to learn more and provide a realistic representation of war, Crane researched many aspects of the battlefield and often referred to scenes he wrote about as “skirmishes on the football field” (“Biography of Stephen Crane”). Ultimately, Crane “saw the opportunity to craft the first novel that explored warfare from the point of view of the psyche” and he “attempt[ed] to show that humans were not designed to commit such atrocities on each other”
Stephen Crane's purpose in writing The Red Badge of Courage was to dictate the pressures faced by the prototypical American soldier in the Civil War. His intent was accomplished by making known the horrors and atrocities seen by Unionist Henry Fleming during the Battle of Chancellorsville, and the conflicts within himself.
Stephen Crane was a realistic author who often times wrote about the difference in ideal life versus reality. He is seen as one of the most groundbreaking writers of his time. Crane’s poetry was unique during his time period because most of his poems told a story; they were narratives. In Crane’s poem “In the Desert” he shows that a person who can overcome their mistakes and not let the negative aspects of life overwhelm the positive is a person who is human.
When Crane notes that, “ it was strange/ to write in this red muck,” there is an indication that he is becoming increasingly more aware of the true effects of personal incorporation into one’s writing. There is a distinctive role that personal and cultural biases play in literature, as one author may incorporate a certain word into their writing that another author does not see as socially appropriate to use, it is the personal inflictions of an author that shape their work and Crane exemplifies the self realization of the important impacts that these inflictions
The world of Stephen Crane's fiction is a cruel, lonely place. Man's environment shows no sympathy or concern for man; in the midst of a battle in The Red Badge of Courage "Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment" (89). Crane frequently anthropomorphizes the natural world and turns it into an agent actively working against the survival of man. From the beginning of "The Open Boat" the waves are seen as "wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall" (225) as if the waves themselves had murderous intent. During battle in The Red Badge of Courage the trees of the forest stretched out before Henry and "forbade him to pass. After its previous hostility this new resistance of the forest filled him with a fine bitterness" (104). More omnipresent than the mortal sense of opposition to nature, however, is the mortal sense of opposition to other men. Crane portrays the Darwinian struggle of men as forcing one man against another, not only for the preservation of one's life, but also the preservation of one's sense of self-worth. Henry finds hope for escape from this condition in the traditional notion that "man becomes another thing in a battle"‹more selfless and connected to his comrades (73). But the few moments in Crane's stories where individuals rise above self-preservation are not the typically heroicized moments of battle. Crane revises the sense of the heroic by allowing selfishness to persist through battle. Only when his characters are faced with the absolute helplessness of another human do they rise above themselves. In these grim situations the characters are reminded of their more fundamental opp...
Gibson, Donald B. The Fiction of Stephen Crane. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. 128-133.
If it was not for Stephen Crane and his visionary work than American Realism would not have taken hold of the United States during the eighteen hundreds. During the years following the Civil War America was a melting pot of many different writing styles. Many scholars argue that at this time there was still no definite American author or technique. Up to this point authors in the Americas simply copied techniques that were popular in regions of Europe. Stephen Crane came onto the scene with a very different approach to many of his contemporaries. He was a realist, and being such he described actions in a true, unadorned way that portrayed situations in the manner that they actually occurred (Kaplan). He had numerous admired pieces but his most famous work was the Red Badge of Courage (Bentley 103). In this novel he illustrates the accounts of a Union soldier named Henry Fleming. At first the writing was considered too graphic and many people did not buy the book. Eventually the American people changed their opinions and began to gravitate towards Crane’s work. The readers were fascinated by the realistic environment he creates even though he himself had never fought in a war (Bentley 103). By spreading the influence of realistic writing Crane has come to be known as the first American Realist.
113-117. Modern Critical Interpretations: Stephan Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Cody, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. Revised Edition.