stephen crane

He turned his attention to more popular topics and wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1895). The book was serialized by a newspaper syndicate, and Crane became an international celebrity at age 24.
1893: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (novel) 1895 The Black Riders (poem) 1895 The Red Badge of Courage (novel)
Best Short Stories The Open Boat (1897) The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1898) The Blue Hotel (1998) An Experiment in Misery
• In the following four sections, the moods of the men fluctuate.They become fatigued and bicker with one another. • When they see a lighthouse on the horizon, their hope is tempered with the realization of the danger of trying to reach it. Their hopes dwindle further when, after seeing a man waving from shore, and what may or may not be another boat, they fail to make contact.
After the novel's success, the newspaper syndicate sent Crane to cover the West and Mexico. In 1897, he went to Cuba to write about the insurrection against Spain. On the way there, he stayed at a dingy hotel where he met Cora Howard Taylor, who became his lifelong companion. In 1897, his boat to Cuba sank, and he barely survived. His short story "The Open Boat" is based on his experiences in ad cook. Crane later covered the war between Greece and Turkey, and settled in England, where he made friends with Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, and Henry James.
Realism and Naturalism In the 1890s, the Naturalists were intensely concerned with the question of whether human beings could exercise control over their fate or whether their fate was determined by their environment. The Naturalists analyzed the “natural” forces or “scientific” laws that affected the “struggle for life.” Stephen Crane said that we live in “a world full of fists” in which the survivors are not necessarily the most “fit” but only the most fortunate.
Crane, the youngest of 14 children, was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey. His father died when Crane was 9, and the family later settled in Asbury Park, New Jersey. At Syracuse University, Crane played baseball for a year before dropping out to become a journalist in New York City. He worked briefly for several newspapers and scraped by in near poverty.
5. Falling Action The men swim to shore. 6. Resolution The correspondent, cook and captain are rescued, but realize that the oiler has drowned. 7. Dénouement As the dead oiler is carried onto land, the other three men finally understand the power of the sea and how lucky they are to be alive.
Crane contracted tuberculosis in his late 20s. Cora Howard Taylor nursed him while he wrote furiously in an attempt to pay off his debts. He exhausted himself and exacerbated his condition. He died in June 1900, at the age of 28.
In 1893, at age 23, he published Maggie. Finding a publisher was difficult given the book's scandalous content, so Crane ultimately published it himself. The book was a critical success but failed to sell well.
Background
Plot
Characters Themes Figures of Speech
Social Darwinism
Every field of thought in the late nineteenth-century was impacted by the theories of Charles Darwin. A variety of thinkers in the social sciences began to apply Darwin’s evolutionary theories to explain the development of human societies. Known as the “Social Darwinists,” these thinkers posited the existence of a process of evolution based on hereditary traits that predetermined the behavior of human beings. The most famous of these thinkers, an English social scientist named Herbert Spencer, popularized the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe the omnipotent law of “natural selection” which determines the natural evolution of society.
1. Exposition Four survivors--a correspondent, a captain, a cook, and an oiler, are in a lifeboat after a shipwreck. 2. Inciting Incident The captain sees the lighthouseon the horizon. 3. Rising Action The men try to row the boat to the shore. 4. Climax The men jump off the boat into the water as the boat overturns.
The Spanish-American War
When Cuban revolutionaries began a war for independence against Spain in 1895, the United States lent financial and moral support to the uprising. American newspapers covered the rebellion closely and ran anti-Spanish stories on a daily basis. Crane, in fact, was employed as a newspaper correspondent(通讯记者) on an assignment covering the uprising when the ship he was traveling on, carrying a cargo of arms for the revolutionaries, sank off the coast of Florida. The reporting of the Spanish-American War reflected a dominant preoccupation with the human struggle to survive amid brutal circumstances.