Biography
Stephen Crane was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. In 1900, at the age of 29, he died of tuberculosis.
He was the youngest of 14 children. His father was a Methodist Minister.
At 19, he was best known for his skill as a baseball player in college. Stephen went to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, then to Syracuse University in New York.
While at Syracuse, he was the correspondent of the New York Tribune. He ended up leaving college at 20 years old.
During the next 10 years, he was an acclaimed journalist and the author of The Badge of Courage (1894). This assured his place in American fiction.
In 1891, Stephen went to New York and wrote for the New York Herald. Shortly after, he lost the job. This is when he decided to try free-lance writing.
Between 1890 and 1900, Stephen Crane worked as a free-lance newspaper reporter writing about New York's slums, the violence in Mexico, the American west, Cuba, and Greece.
Some of his close writers friends were H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James.
In 1893, he republished his story "Maggie, a Girl of the Streets" under the name Johnston Smith. The first time the story was published, it did not gain recognition. However, when it was republished, it did get attention. Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells recognized his talent and became his mentors.
In May of 1895, Stephen Crane's first collection of poems were published. He named them "The Black Riders." They did not receive the reviews that Crane had hoped for.
In October of 1895, Appleton's (an important press at those times) brought out Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage." From then on, he received the fame that he had worked hard to achieve.
In 1896, "Maggie" was republished by Appleton's with the help of writer-critic Frank Norris. He cleaned up Crane's work, helping it to receive the recognition that it had lacked in 1893.
From 1896-1897 Crane was assigned to go to Cuba to write about the military confrontation between Spain and the United States (1898). There, he met Cora Taylor at the Hotel de Dream. He would stay with her until his death. Coming to Cuba in 1897, he experienced having the boat he was on sink with him on it. He survived, and wrote "The Open Boat," a report that shortly after turned into a short story.
In 1898, Stephen went back to the Caribbean to report about the Spanish-American War for the New York World, a famous Pulitzer paper.
In the last year of his life, Crane wrote many stories and prepared his second book of poetry, War is Kind. He was very ill with tuberculosis. On June 5, 1900, Stephen Crane died while Cora got him to a German sanitorium in hopes that the illness would cease.