Almanac of Story Tellers: Stephen Crane

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Nov. 1st

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    It is the 305th day of the year, leaving 60 days remaining in 2022. 

    On this date in 1871, the author Stephen Crane was born.

 

   He is best known for his novel, The Red Badge of Courage, but his short stories are often considered superior works. He told those stories in colorful settings, with well-drawn characters whom he set off to explore human nature and destiny.

    His novels were both realistic and impressionistic. He achieved dramatic tension by using irony and pity, illusion and reality. 

    In his later years, he worked as a war correspondent, partly to determine how realistic his  visions of the battlegrounds of the American Civil War were in The Red Badge of Courage. Veterans and observers of the war had praised his writing for its ability to reproduce the sense of actual combat.

    His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, written in 1893, was shocking for its time. Like Crane, i was sympathetic to its protagonist, a young innocent girl from a poor neighborhood who turns to a life on the streets because of abuse, poverty, and alcoholism. Crane, who wrote under a pseudonym, paid for the publication of the novel.

    He turned to journalism for a while before writing The Red Badge of Courage. 

    Among his later short stories was The Open Boat, a semi-autobiographical tale about a young man's effort to became a war correspondent and his survival after being on a boat that was attacked and sunk. Crane and several others rowed to shore on a dinghy.

    Crane died in 1900.