Biography

The eldest of fourteen children, Stephen Crane moved numerous times with his family before settling in Asbury Park, New Jersey. He entered Syracuse University but preferred baseball to academics and left after one semester. With a desire to pursue journalism, Crane moved to New York City, where he worked on his first book, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York), which he published at his own expense in 1893. After his novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage (1894), was serialized in national newspapers, Crane took a job as a roving reporter for a newspaper syndicate. He traveled throughout the American West and Mexico and later covered the Cuban insurrection against Spain. In 1897 a ship he was on sank off the coast of Florida, and Crane used this experience in his story The Open Boat, which addresses the reactions of people under pressure and nature's indifference to humanity's plight. That same year, deeply in debt, he moved to England, where he became seriously ill with tuberculosis. He increased his writing schedule in an attempt to make money, drafting thirteen stories and publishing his second volume of poetry, among other works, but his health failed him. Crane died at the age of twenty-eight, having produced enough articles, stories, novels, and poems to fill a twelve-volume set.

Explorations

The Blue Hotel (1898) has strong similarities to London's To Build a Fire and to other tales from the heyday of literary naturalism. We have protagonists (men, as usual) in extreme or exotic conditions, making terrible and costly discoveries about themselves and perhaps about human nature. Fort Romper, Nebraska, does not exist, and, as in London's story, important characters lack names. In various ways, therefore, the tale nudges us to consider it as about something more than one isolated incident in a supremely isolated place -- and we have to decide if, and how, to take those hints.

1. Read over some of the dialogue in The Blue Hotel. One commonplace about the achievements and lasting contributions of literary realism and naturalism is that artists in these modes made conversations sound more real. Consider Crane's dialogue with that observation in mind. If these characters sound "real" to you, describe how. In what ways do they, and don't they, listen to one another? Why is that attentiveness, or lack of it, important to the tale?

2. Discuss ways in which The Blue Hotel is a wild-west story about the dangers of reading wild-west stories. Is that a clever but subordinate aspect of this tale or one of the narrative's major themes?

3. Several tales by Wharton and James introduce us to a modern sort of evil, an evil which grows from passivity or negligence, from people allowing things to happen, rather than from active, malevolent perpetration. Discuss The Blue Hotel as a narrative exploring a similar moral issue.

Other sites to consult:

• "Imaging the Civil War: Authenticity in Painting, Photography, and The Red Badge of Courage". An illustrated essay at the website for the American Studies group at the University of Virginia.
• A useful biography, bibliography, and discussion of Crane's place in the history of the American tragic novel. Adapted from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica.
• Texts relating to the Civil War. Includes numerous important documents such as the Constitution of the Confederate States of America; the writings of Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis, among others; and links to online texts of The Red Badge of Courage and other works by Crane.
• Critical reception of The Red Badge of Courage. Includes an overview and links to numerous contemporary reviews that illustrate, as Joseph Conrad later wrote, how "Crane's work detonated on our literary sensibilities with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive. Unexpected it fell amongst us; and its fall was followed by a great outcry." (From the American Studies Group at the University of Virginia.)