Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire

by Paul Sorrentino

Overview

With the exception of Poe, no American writer has proven as challenging to biographers as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—continues to be surrounded by myths and half-truths, distortions and outright fabrications. Mindful of the pitfalls that have marred previous biographies, Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most complete and accurate account of the poet and novelist written to date.

Whether Crane was dressing as a hobo to document the life of the homeless in the Bowery, defending a prostitute against corrupt New York City law enforcement, or covering the historic charge up the San Juan hills as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, his adventures were front-page news. From Sorrentino’s layered narrative of the various phases of Crane’s life a portrait slowly emerges. By turns taciturn and garrulous, confident and insecure, romantic and cynical, Crane was a man of irresolvable contradictions. He rebelled against tradition yet was proud of his family heritage; he lived a Bohemian existence yet was drawn to social status; he romanticized women yet obsessively sought out prostitutes; he spurned a God he saw as remote yet wished for His presence.

Incorporating decades of research by the foremost authority on Crane’s work, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire sets a new benchmark for biographers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674049536
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2014
Pages:	520
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Paul Sorrentino is the Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor of English at Virginia Tech.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Prologue: Final Days, January-June 1900 10

Part I The Wrenches of Childhood

1 Roots and Beginnings: 1635-1871 19

2 Childhood: 1871-1884 30

3 The Holiness Controversy: 1874-1879 43

4 Onward to Port Jervis: March 1878-February 1880 50

5 Schooling at Asbury Park, Pennington, Claverack: March 1880-Spring 1890 57

6 College at Lafayette and Syracuse: September 1890-May 1891 66

Part II Learning the Craft

7 Fledgling Writer: 1887-December 1891 83

8 Satirist in Asbury Park: Summer 1892 92

9 Maggie: September 1892-March 1893 103

10 Genesis of The Red Badge of Courage: 1893-February 1894 115

11 Struggling Artist, Poet at Work: February-March 1894 127

12 Frustrated Artist: April-December 1894 138

12 On the Verge of Celebrity: January-October 1895 150

Part III Fame, Notoriety, an altered point of view

14 International Fame: Fall 1895-Spring 1896 169

15 Price of Fame: January-September 1896 186

16 The Dora Clark Incident: Fall 1890 200

17 Jacksonville: November-December 1896 210

18 The Commodore Incident: January 1897 222

19 The Greco-Turkish War: January-May 1897 232

Part IV New Start, Old Habits

20 Raverabrook, Harold Frederic. Joseph Conrad: June-October 1897 249

21 Creative Outburst; October 1897-April 1898 262

22 Prelude to War: January-May 1898 274

23 War in Cuba: June-July 1898 284

24 New York City, Adirondacks, Puerto Rico: July-August 1898 295

25 Havana: September-December 1898 305

Part V Search for Respectability, Country Squire

26 Brede Place, Return to Childhood, Another Potboiler: January-June 1899 321

27 Brede Place Visitors, Return to Ancestry: June-August 1899 337

28 Trips to Europe, Final Celebration, Badenweiler: September 1899-June 1900 350

Abbreviations 371

Notes 373

Acknowledgements 453

Index 455

Editorial Reviews

Sorrentino tracks Stephen Crane's life with lively precision…Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire skillfully amplifies our knowledge of a singular American artist and his brief, uncompromising life.

The New York Times Book Review - Jayne Anne Phillips

Stephen Crane seemed elusive to his contemporaries, and he proved equally elusive to generations of biographers. At last, Paul Sorrentino has produced a scrupulously reliable biography that is also wonderfully concise and colorful. It will stand for the foreseeable future as the definitive account of Crane’s life.

Michael Robertson

[Sorrentino’s] Life of Fire is significant in advancing our understanding of Crane, an enigmatic literary prodigy… [An] encyclopedic biography of Crane.

New Jersey Herald - Anthony Splendora

Sorrentino transports readers to the intensely personal battlefields that test Crane’s artistic sincerity while exposing his desperation and loneliness… A revealing portrait, sweeping away the illusions surrounding an enigmatic genius.

Booklist (starred review) - Bryce Christensen

[A] sturdy new life of Crane… Sorrentino is perceptive.

Literary Review - Jay Parini

[Sorrentino’s] book offers the most comprehensive picture to date, and it enables us to piece together a new Stephen Crane: a figure as driven to prove his manhood as Jack London; as plaintive about his broken faith as Herman Melville; and as ironic about his personal self, and as recklessly disinclined to take conventional sexual morals seriously, as Oscar Wilde.

New Yorker - Caleb Crain

Evocative… Sorrentino’s biography gives us Crane in fact and tone… Sorrentino tracks Stephen Crane’s life with lively precision… Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire skillfully amplifies our knowledge of a singular American artist and his brief, uncompromising life.

Jayne Anne Phillips

06/15/2014
No one did literary impressionism better than Stephen Crane (1871–1900). In his best works, readers feel what it was like to be inside extreme events—such as living a hopeless life in the ghetto (Maggie, a Girl of the Streets) or in the midst of battle (The Red Badge of Courage). His life was tumultuous, with forays into Greece and Cuba in times of war and a succession of indiscretions, money worries, and scrapes at home. As interesting as the man was, writing about Crane's life is a challenge. He was famously secretive about himself, leaving few letters behind and no journal. To complicate matters, early biographer Thomas Beer (Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters) imagined dialog and incidents that have been incorporated uncritically in most subsequent studies. With two books on Crane already under his belt, no author is better placed to navigate this maze than Sorrentino (Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor of English, Virginia Tech.; Stephen Crane: A Documentary Volume). There are a few pedestrian passages here, in which Sorrentino pushes the envelope in his attempts to decipher where Crane borrowed from events, persons, places, and preoccupations in his own life and grafted them into his fiction, but on balance it's a valuable corrective to previous accounts. VERDICT This biography will please the lay enthusiast but its primary audience is scholarly.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Library Journal

2014-03-16
Thoroughly researched biography of Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who shocked his contemporaries with raw, gritty fiction. Sorrentino (English/Virginia Tech; editor: Stephen Crane Remembered, 2006, etc.) faced challenges in writing this biography: mainly, previous books that perpetuated errors and lies and few sources to set the record straight. His study chronicles the personal and literary struggles of a controversial writer who vowed to live "a life of fire." The youngest son in a large family of precociously intelligent children, Crane refused to follow in his father's footsteps as a minister, instead hoping to train at West Point for a military career. However, his plan was deflected by an older brother's advice to enter a mining-engineering program at Lafayette College. There, and later at Syracuse University, Crane was a mediocre student, preferring to drink, smoke, play poker and carouse with his fraternity brothers; he finally dropped out and moved to New York City, intent on becoming a writer. While barely supporting himself as a journalist, he finished a novel drawn from the life he observed in the city's slums: "the bleak portrayal of a naïve, sentimental girl in the tenements of New York." Unable to find a publisher for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane published the book himself, winning praise from writer Hamlin Garland and influential editor William Dean Howells. The novel, Sorrentino writes, was "the first significant example of literary determinism in American literature," but its candor and pessimism made critics wary of reviewing it. Three years later, though, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane's psychological study of a Civil War soldier, generated adulation and fame. Good fortune was short-lived, however; bad business decisions and "questionable ethics" eroded what he earned, and Crane's last years were fraught with financial troubles. He kept writing, always hoping for a fresh start, until tuberculosis killed him at the age of 28. Sorrentino's authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a "bohemian rebel" and prolific, groundbreaking writer.

Kirkus Reviews