November 1, 2014 The Writers Almanac Its the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Stephen Crane (books by this author), born in Newark, New Jersey (1871). As a young man, he considered becoming a professional baseball player. He played catcher on his prep school team. At the time, baseball catchers wore almost no protective gear, and the catchers mitt was basically a gardening glove with a little extra padding. Stephen Crane became famous within his prep school league for being able to catch anything, even barehanded. One of his teammates said, He played baseball with fiendish glee. Crane had started cutting classes to spend all his time in New York City, and he was fascinated by what he found there. He began writing for New York City tabloids while he was still a teenager. His first novel was Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Booksellers wouldnt stock it, so he gave away about a hundred copies and burned the rest. He said, I cannot see why people hate ugliness in art. Ugliness is just a matter of treatment. Then, after reading a series of reminiscences of Civil War veterans published in newspapers, Crane decided to write a Civil War story himself. The result was his novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the story of Henry Fleming, who signs up for the 304th New York regiment, hoping to experience the glory of battle that hes read about in school. The Red Badge of Courage made him famous. It was called the most realistic war novel ever written, and no one could believe that its author was a twenty-four year old whod never been in battle himself. Civil War veterans wrote in to newspapers claiming that they knew Stephen Crane; theyd fought beside him in various Civil War battles. When the writer Hamlin Garland asked him how hed conveyed the battlefield scenes so vividly, Stephen Crane said hed just drawn on his own experience as an athlete. Crane spent the rest of his life working as a war correspondent. On New Years Eve in 1896, he was on a boat to Cuba to cover the Spanish American War when the boat hit a sandbar and sank. He barely survived in a small dingy with three other men and spent 30 hours at sea, eventually jumping ship and swimming to shore. The event damaged his health and contributed to his death of TB a few years later at the age of twenty-eight, but it also inspired his short story The Open Boat (1898).
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 11:12:57 +0000
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