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Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1871–1900)

One of fourteen children, Stephen Crane and his family moved frequently before settling, after his father's death in 1880, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Crane sporadically attended various preparatory schools and colleges without excelling at much besides baseball.Determined to be a journalist, he left school for the last time in 1891 and began contributing pieces to New York newspapers.His city experiences led him to write Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a realist social-reform novel published in 1893 at his own expense. His next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), presented a stark picture of the Civil War and brought him widespread fame; many of his stories were published in the collections The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) and The Monster and Other Stories (1899).Crane served as a foreign correspondent, reporting on conflicts in Cuba and Greece, and lived his last years abroad, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 28.

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