Dead before Thirty: Stephen Crane, Author

Stephen Crane, writer (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900)

It may have been Stephen Crane Virginia Woolf was thinking of when she derided the state of her era’s literature for being more interested in matters of men and their wars than in the thoughts of women as they sat in drawing rooms. Crane’s signature piece, The Red Badge of Courage, has but one woman with a speaking role, and his other great work, The Open Boat, has no women at all. His life, as well, was one of adventure, gambling, war, and brothels.

One can little blame Crane for his material any more than you can any writer for the things they write about, but it’s undeniable that in his day Crane was both masculine and popular. While writing his first novel, the self-published Maggie (at the time a scandalous portrait of a fallen woman), he lived for a time in the notorious Five Corners of New York, amongst prostitutes and criminals. The Red Badge of Courage contains extended scenes of epic Civil War battles, and a central character who aches above all things to be considered heroic, to be tested and found worthy, and in the end considers himself both. In story after story, Crane explores men and their need to test themselves against each other in a world which cares nothing for their survival or death. It is little wonder that Hemingway considered him an inspiration, and popularized him when his literary reputation had fallen.

During his life, Crane achieved great fame on both sides of the Atlantic, and after the success of The Red Badge, parlayed his fame into a series of adventures as field reporter in the American West and later the Spanish-American war, where he traveled for a time with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Then, Crane fell into disrepute when he began a long-term relationship with Cora Taylor, the madam of a Jacksonville, Florida brothel. After a brief stint covering the Greco-Turkish war for the Hearst syndicate, Crane settled in England with Cora, where he lived the life of a profligate ex-patriot, throwing lavish parties that only left him deeper in debt. He struck up friendships with HG Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. In 1900, he collapsed during a party, the tuberculosis he’d been living with finally catching up to him. He died in a spa in Germany in June, not yet 29 years old.

Over a hundred years later, Virgina Woolf may have the final laugh. Bookstores have become the playground of chick-lit bestsellers of single women chatting over lattes, and war stories are requisitely broody, irony-laden apologias for the cliché of war as a pointless relic of barbarous times. One reads his poem War is Kind, and you may not regret that his star has faded.