Stephen Crane Biography

Stephen Crane was a nineteenth century journalist, a poet, and a novelist. Crane was best known for his realism, especially in his novels The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A girl of the streets. Paul Sorrentino, the author of Stephen Crane’s Biography, compliment Crane by saying “Poems and First Paragraphs came to him with “every world in place, every comma, every period fixed.”

Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. He was the last and final child out of 14. His father, Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane, was a Methodist minister for over 40 churches in the Newark, New Jersey area, and his mother, Mary Helen Peck Crane, was a homemaker and devoted mother. As a child he was really involved with religious activities and festivals due to his father’s profession.

The first college he attended was Claverack College for two years, followed by Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Then he attended Syracuse University in New York. His career as a writer finally took off in 1892, when he moved to New York, and began freelancing as a writer. From there he moved back to Paterson, New Jersey with one of his brothers. When he lived with his brother, he wrote short pieces about what he experienced in New York. He wrote about the poverty, and the everyday life of someone living of the streets.

During the time he lived in New York, Stephen was extremely poor. In the era of when he was writing one of his first novels, he starved himself and wore rubber boots just to save money. That is why his pieces on poverty and street life were so powerful because he used a style of literature called Realism. Crane is extremely famous for his ability to use realism in his pieces; it causes the reader to experience real life