Stephen Crane : Prose and Poetry : Maggie, A Girl of the Streets / The Red Badge of Courage / Stories, Sketches, Journalism / The Black Riders / War Is Kind (Library of America)

Awesome

Stephen Crane was a gifted writer! His stories and the type that you can not stop reading and once you read them they stay with you!

This is a typically well done Library of America volume that includes most if not all of what Crane wrote and published. It is hard to read Crane without thinking "what might have been." Almost everything in the volume was written over a span of eight years before Crane's early death at 29. The volume is nicely organized, with the "novels" (none is too long) collected at the beginning of the volume, most of the short stories together, and Crane's journalism organized by subject--Mexico, Cuba, etc. Unfortunately, perhaps, Crane was most famous and most often engaged as a journalist, and principally a war journalist as a result of Red Badge of Courage. No doubt his hardships and travels took a toll on his health, but he gave us some wonderful writing about the frontier, Mexico, Cuba, and other exotica, and war, almost always emphasizing its wasteful destructiveness and human suffering, not the "heroism" of conquest otherwise celebrated in the press. As to the novels, Red Badge is clearly his masterpiece. It shows off all of his skills--wonderful descriptive powers and psychological insight. Maggie is impressive as the early work of a young man, and is notable for its descriptions and treatment of the harsh underbelly of growing urban society, its hypocricy and exploitation of the weak. Maggie's mother is a work of art. It is not a great piece, but somewhat groundbreaking in its realism and subject matter. Crane, to some extent, opened the door for American naturalism and realism. One thing I find a little strange about Maggie is that the title character is barely there as a character. Perhaps that is the point as she is more acted upon than acting and could be any of a multitude of young women. George's Mother is less successful, though as bleak as Maggie as the title character watches her son slip away from her into a "man's world" of alcohol and dissipation. The Monster is little read, but poses a real moral dilemma as the doctor on whom we focus must choose between his career and social acceptance and the dictates of his conscience. Again, "society" is thoroughly exposed as shallow, misguided and even cruel, forcing terrible choices of conscience.I think Crane is at his best in some of the short fiction. For example, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky really shows off his descriptive power--the opening train sequence is simply brilliant, from the descriptions of the landscape, the train, the porters, and the uncomfortable couple returning from their marriage. The Blue Hotel may be his best piece, and epitomizes that uncomfortable ambiguity and irony that weaves through most of Crane. (Strangely, I recently saw Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller and couldn't help but feel a kinship between the two.) As to his poetry, it is matter of taste. The Black Riders is not really a coherent whole, though consistent. It is "imagistic" in a style relatively new for the time and does include images and passages that make an indelible impression individually and collectively reveal the author's attitude to existence and his reaction to much of the trauma and death he had witnessed. The journalism is immensely entertaining.All in all, Crane is an American author well worth exploring past the book that everyone seems to be assigned in high school, Red Badge, and this is a fine volume for exploration.

His prose is excellent, but his poetry (the black riders / war is kind) is what stays with me. The striking images, dark humor and subversive fight against authority bring me back to the book decade after decade. These aren't Shakespearean sonnets; if he was born a hundred years later he would be channeling his raw feelings into writing lyrics for Rage Against the Machine. His poetry seems so modern it is hard to reconcile it with the completely different feel of The Red Badge of Courage and his splendid Spanish American War reporting.

Great looking book but disappointed to see it come without the dust jacket as I quite like the design of the LoA series

Interested in good writing.