Great Short Works of Stephen Crane

These 11 stories run from a few pages to about 125 pages. Crane evokes a great deal of color describing his scenes with a relative economy of words. He uses irony alot in his writing but is never cruel. He objectively writes about people struggling in harsh environments against overpowering fates but shows compassion.The first story and the longest is "The Red Badge of Courage." Of all the stories, it may be best overall. The motivations of Henry Fleming and his fellow soldiers are really well drawn. They really don't want to be there, but feel they have to be heroes and at times they force themselves to be. But when the going gets tough in battle, many of them turn around and run. Crane portrays Henry as overhearing a general as saying to the effect that Henry's regiment was expeendable cannon fodder and this revelation very much grates on Henry's fellows. The next story is "Maggie: A Girl of The Street." The story seems to be set in the late 19th century in an Irish tenament slum in New York. The account of the younger years of Maggie and her brother Jimmie ends with a scene of the two huddling in a corner of the flat as their parents lay sprawled out asleep on the floor, amidst broken furniture and dishes, after a drunken brawl with each other. It is such an environment like this that Maggie grows up. Jimmie grows up to be a truck driver and a brute. But Maggie is something of a flower amidst tenament squalor and catches the eye of Jimmie's friend Pete. Jimmy hears, from an old lady in his building who overheard a conversation between Pete and Maggie after one of their dates, that Maggie begged Pete to say that he loved her. Obviously this is a discrete intimation that Pete has taken Maggie's virginity. Well, this sets Johnnie and his barbaric mother into quite a rage and it goes downhill for Maggie there. The biographical note at the back of the book, presumably written by the author of the fine introduction, James Colvert, says that Crane dosen't get into Maggie's mind. I think that's because she's extremely ignorant, with a mind numbed by a violent environment and lack of stimulation. The characters in this story engage in really thick Irish accents. I think the funniest dialogue is Pete's drunken conversation with his lady friends in the bar towards the end. Another comes from Jimmie and Maggie's mother Mary's lamentations to the effect that she didn't understand how Maggie could turn out so bad after being raised so well by her, Mary. I liked the description of the scenes in the cheap theaters where Pete takes Maggie. I don't understand what the next to last chapter with "the girl" walking the streets is about. Other stories include "The Monster," an effective tragedy about a black servant named Henry Johnson of a white doctor in rural New England, who gets his face literally burned off and his brain damaged after trying to save the doctor's son in a fire. Both whites and blacks in the town are terribly afraid of Henry because his burne

"The battle flag in the distance jerked about madly. It seemed to be struggling to free itself from an agony. The billowing smoke was filled with horizontal flashes." (Crane, TRBOC).If you were to mix Monet with the Civil War you would have "The Red Badge of Courage," penned by one of America's finest writers, Stephen Crane. His sense of hues and the dripping colors of the sky come together to paint some of the most beautiful literature humanly possible.Stephen Crane is, above all, an Impressionist. His writing is strongly suggestive of the culmination of myriad viewpoints and perspectives. Scenes are not depicted from a distance, but rather from isolated instances on the battlefield. Esoteric symbols are utilized to bombard the reader with a certain cosmopolitan consciousness. "The Red Badge of Courage," however, is not my favorite of Crane's works, but "The Open Boat." This short story is the monument to Crane's genius, the triumph of his language and arbitrary mode of experience, it is like viewing a story from many assorted "first person(s)."Words could not explain my love of "The Open Boat."Read Crane, love Crane, regardless of your High School preconceptions.

A most magnificent piece of war journalism The Red Badge of Courage was crafted from interviews with Civil War veterans. Crane wasn't born yet when the Civil War was actually happening but by some strange feat of the imagination he takes you there. You've probably read this at some point in your school days but read it as an adult too. The prose is actually less literary journalism and more a highly crafted and stylized subjective telling of the war experience through Henry Fleming's eyes. Crane was admired by Conrad(who called him the "best of the boys" and who like Crane is also called a literary impressionist) and Hemingway whose own prose and journalism owe much to him. The short stories("Open Boat"one of the best sea episodes ever described) are also excellent and since Crane only lived 29 years this volume contains all his important work. His work was groundbreaking and his style has an immediate quality to it that leaves one with the feeling of having lived through the experiences he describes. In his short life he constantly sought the extremes. The medium length work Maggie describes a prostitutes existence and in true Crane style does not spare any of the gritty details though again it is not strict objectivity which marks the Crane style. In my mind he belongs alongside Conrad as one of the great originals who were writing at a very high point in literary history. Some would say they have not been matched. There is still much in their styles which has never been improved upon.

Let's assume that the American public schools haven't completely gone to the dogs and that everyone had to read this book at some point. So you're all familiar with the basic story: young Northern man boldly sallies forth to war despite Mom's entreaties, but then realizes that he has no idea why he's there and fears that he may prove to be a coward. Indeed, given his first taste of battle, he does bolt and then wanders the battlefield too ashamed to return to his unit. But when he finally rejoins them a blow from the rifle butt of another soldier is mistaken for a battle wound and his cowardice is not discovered. Given a second chance, the youth redeems himself gloriously and in the process becomes a man.The novel's excellent reputation is well deserved; it is brief but brutally powerful. Its descriptions of battle certainly seem realistic and the moral dilemma of the young man is one of the central problems of manhood. There's nothing not to like. So did I miss something? Why does my copy, and why do so many references to the book, refer to it as an antiwar statement? I actually read it as a pro war novel.Let's go through the steps:First, we've got the young man doubting his own courage and fearing that this feeling is unique to him. But the words of another soldier demonstrate that his fears are normal: The tall private waved his hand. "Well", said he profoundly, "I've thought it might get too hot for Jim Conklin in some of them scrimmages, and if a whole lot of boys started and run, why, I s'pose I'd start and run. And if I once started to run, I'd run like the devil, and no mistake. But if everybody was a-standing and a-fighting, why, I'd stand and fight. Be jiminey, I would. I'll bet on it." The youth of this tale felt gratitude for these words of his comrade. He had feared that all of the untried men possessed great and correct confidence. He now was in a measure reassured.I've argued elsewhere that every male has a little demon within him asking if, when push comes to shove, he will have the physical and/or moral courage to be a man in the face of death. This is one of the reasons that war has always been with us, the desire to find the answer to the demon's question. This is the element of Red Badge of Courage that makes it a universal tale.At first, the young man is able, like millions of men before and after, to put aside his doubts by subsuming himself within the fighting unit: He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part--a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country--was in crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand. If he had thought the regiment was about to be annihilated perhaps he could have amputated him

This book is an excellent introduction to the writing of Stephen Crane, a largely forgotten writer at the beginning of our new century. Most kids are forced to read the Red Badge of Courage at some point, but very few readers make it to some of his excellent short stories, especially "The Open Boat" and "The Blue Hotel". Read, enjoy, and please pay close attention to the existentialist absurdity found so often in Crane's work. The modernist tone of his writing, along with his realism, was well ahead of his time.