He turned his attention to more popular topics and began writing The Red Badge of Courage, which made him into an international celebrity at age The newspaper syndicate that serialized the novel sent him on assignment to cover the West and Mexico. In , he went to Cuba to write about the insurrection against Spain. On the way there, he stayed at a dingy hotel where he met Cora Howard Taylor, who became his lifelong companion.
In , his boat to Cuba sank, and he barely survived. Crane later covered the war between Greece and Turkey, and finally settled in England, where he made friends with Joseph Conrad, H. Wells and Henry James. Crane contracted tuberculosis in his late 20s.
Cora Howard Taylor nursed him while he wrote furiously in an attempt to pay off his debts. He exhausted himself and exacerbated his condition. He died in June , at the age of Instead of the "vague and bloody conflicts" which he longed to see , Henry encounters the "foul atmosphere" of war, with its choking smoke and deafening noise The first round of fighting suffocates Henry and leaves him "reeling from exhaustion" Contrary to his romantic visions, he discovers that in real battle there is "a singular absence of heroic poses" Henry also discovers that being wounded is not something to be envied.
He witnesses the "cursing, groaning, and wailing" of his fellow soldiers and then is wounded himself; he sinks "writhing to the ground" with "numbing pain" Death is also portrayed very realistically, with vivid descriptions of the "ghastly forms" which lay motionless, "twisted in fantastic contortions" Henry experiences the true horror of death as he watches in anguish while his friend Jim suffers and dies.
Today, many of the romantic myths about war have been destroyed through television and movies such as Born on the Fourth of July , which shows war with all its suffering, pain, and death.
Yet it was Stephen Crane who, a century ago, deglorified war through the experiences of Henry Fleming. With his frequent contrasts between romantic vision and cold reality, Crane clearly portrays the true horrors of war.
Crane, Stephen. Stephen Crane was born in in Newark, New Jersey. The fourteenth child of highly religious Methodist parents, Crane lapsed into a rebellious childhood during which he spent time preparing for a career as a professional baseball player. After brief flirtations with higher learning at Lafayette College and Syracuse University, Crane turned to writing full-time.
Convinced that he must invest his work with the authenticity of experience, he often went to outlandish lengths to live through situations that he intended to work into his novels. The attention of the English critics caused many Americans to view the novel with renewed enthusiasm, catapulting the young Crane into international literary prominence.
The result is almost mythological in feeling, and mythological in the strict Greek sense that everything seems foreordained, with no one ever master of his fate. We live and die by chance and fortune. Intelligently cast with young veterans of the war just ended, including the Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy, it evokes exactly the trembling confusion of non-heroic adolescents thrown into a slaughterhouse which Crane sought in his prose.
Talked of and written up, Crane found that everyone wanted to be his employer or his friend, including William Randolph Hearst, who was just starting his reign at the New York Journal , and Teddy Roosevelt, then the commissioner of the New York City Police. There was even a testimonial dinner held for him in Buffalo, late in , where everyone got drunk. Then it all went wrong. He lived with one, Amy, who was less a sex worker than a woman who worked out her sexual decisions for herself, having a lively series of attachments to men other than Crane, even as she loved him.
Crane intervened on behalf of both women, insisting to Becker that he was the husband of the chorus girl. The next morning, in police court, he intervened on behalf of Dora Clark as well.
At first, Crane was admired for his gallantry. Then Becker was brought up on charges, and he brutally beat Dora Clark in retaliation. To top it off, the police had raided his apartment and found an opium pipe. Crane had earlier done a remarkably fine job on a piece about opium smoking, though Auster is unsure whether Crane smoked the stuff. Either way, he did hang the opium pipe on the wall of his apartment, a trophy of his adventures.
The headlines altered overnight, as they will. The brave defender of embattled womanhood, not to mention the bright hope of American literature, suddenly became the guy who kept a fast woman in a Chelsea residence and smoked dope. Crane seems, on the surface, to have maintained his composure in the face of the scandal. Auster supposes that much of this was money that Crane had received as royalties—it was a lot of money, and makes sense as a check from a publisher for a hit book—and promised, and then failed, to give to her.
And not her alone. It is unknown to his eyes as are the shadows of trees at night, and yet it towers over him, monstrous, implacable, infernal, his fate—this patient, comfortable chair. He is still the only New York City policeman ever to be put to death. The New York scandal helped propel Crane out of the city.
He began a long period of wandering, most of it with his new and devoted common-law wife, Cora—a business-minded woman who once established what may have been a brothel, in Florida. He went to Greece, in , to report on the Hellenic battles with the Turks, and then to Cuba, to cover the Spanish-American War, which his previous employer, Hearst, had helped start, and his current employer, Pulitzer, wanted readers to enjoy.
The fame he had earned so young kept him busy with journalistic and newspaper jobs. As a writer who had shown an unprecedented mastery of writing about a war that he had never seen, he kept getting jobs reporting on wars that he could see, and ended up writing about them much less well. Crane never stopped writing, pursuing both journalism, with spasmodically interesting results, and poetry, in bursts of demonic energy.
Crane learned in reporting what another generation of poets would learn only in the Great War:. Swift blazing flag of the regiment, Eagle with crest of red and gold, These men were born to drill and die. Point for them the virtue of slaughter, Make plain to them the excellence of killing And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
The jobs he could get, like writing for Hearst and Pulitzer, paid well but depended on his being out there, writing. No one lived on advances.
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