He was sent to a Methodist boarding school, but he dreamed of a career in the military, and when, in a dispute over a hazing incident, a teacher called him a liar, he dropped out. His mother agreed to send him to a semi-military academy instead. He loved it. He memorized Tennyson, taught younger boys about poker and romance, played baseball, and rose to the rank of captain in the school’s military corps. In the summers, he worked for an older brother, a bandanna-wearing eccentric who ran a news bureau in Asbury Park, which supplied the New York Tribune with reports of socialites’ visits to the town, then a fashionable resort.

In 1890, another brother persuaded Stephen to give up on the military, arguing that there wasn’t likely to be a war in his lifetime. He enrolled at Lafayette College, in order to study mining engineering. It was a practical idea, but he failed five of his seven classes. In writing, he got a zero. His only achievement seems to have been joining the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and, after a desperate transfer to Syracuse, a semester later, he arrived at the frat house on the new campus, as a friend recalled, “in a cab and a cloud of tobacco smoke.” By then, the only thing he took seriously was baseball. “Mr. Crane, what are you in this university for?” one of his professors asked. He admitted to an interest in journalism.

He began to write for a college paper, and an old friend of the family hired him as the Syracuse correspondent for the Tribune. Sorrentino believes that Crane began to explore Syracuse’s slums, police courts, and bordellos as a reporter, and that it was during his one semester at Syracuse that he shaped this material into a first draft of “Maggie.” The novel as published, however, is set in New York. Crane might have gleaned some of his urban details from literature—New Yorkers had been writing about waifs and prostitutes for half a century—but he no doubt came by many of them firsthand. He explored New York in forays during the next two years, while living with his brothers upstate. In October, 1892, he moved to the city, renting a room in a boarding house on Avenue A with a fraternity brother, and revised the manuscript extensively.

To signal that the characters in “Maggie” were not necessarily in charge of their life stories, Crane deployed an irony that verged on scorn. When Maggie is impressed by a bartender’s boast of having “plunked” a “blokie” who challenged him, Crane writes that she “perceived that here was the beau ideal of a man.” The contrast between the characters’ dialect and the narrator’s formal diction can become heavy-handed, but Crane relished linguistic texture, allowing it to take the foreground in a way that his contemporaries William Dean Howells and Henry James almost never did. Maggie’s mother takes a drink from what Crane calls “a squdgy bottle,” and she dismisses her daughter’s fall from grace with the squawky line “She goes teh deh bad, like a duck teh water.” Crane worried over every sentence, according to friends. “Not until it had been completely formulated would he put pen to paper,” his first New York roommate recalled. Sometimes he wrote just a polished phrase on a scrap of paper, only afterward figuring out where to lodge it.

Unable to find a publisher, Crane scraped together the money for “Maggie” to be printed. He chose yellow covers and the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and his friends threw him a raucous party. The novelist Hamlin Garland was enthusiastic about “Maggie,” and Howells, though apprehensive about the profanity in the dialogue, invited Crane to tea. He had to borrow a pair of pants from a friend in order to look presentable.

To advertise the book, Crane hired four men to read it as conspicuously as possible on the elevated train, which, unfortunately, had little effect on sales. “It fell flat,” he later admitted. But praise from a writer of Howells’s prominence gave Crane the feeling of having been launched. “Well, at least, I’ve done something,” he wrote to a married woman he was flirting with. He was fighting, he told her, in a “beautiful war,” and he was on the side of the realists—those who believe that “we are the most successful in art when we approach the nearest to nature and truth.” The woman stopped writing back, but Crane’s spirits remained high.

He fell in with a bohemian circle of artists, writers, and medical students, and an illustrator named Corwin K. Linson invited him to bunk in his studio. “The joint is open house,” Linson said. At night on Linson’s roof, they listened to echoes of Shakespeare being performed in a theatre around the corner. It was a milieu in which eros went largely unpoliced. One night, when leaving a late poker game, a friend noticed a girl in Crane’s bed and, referring to his novel, asked, “Is it Maggie?” “Some of her,” Crane said. A photograph from the period shows Crane and another man nestled together asleep, a pile of shoes on the floor beside them. (But a rumor that Crane tried to write a novel about a male prostitute seems to derive from one of Beer’s fabrications.) “We just about lived on potato salad for days at a time,” Linson recalled, but sometimes they went out to a Sixth Avenue restaurant called Boeuf-à-la-Mode (nickname: Buffalo Mud), where the food was cheap, the napkins soiled, and the Spanish waltzes loud. In one building where Crane rented a room, a quote from Emerson was chalked onto a ceiling beam: “Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age.”

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Linson kept a shelf of back issues of the magazine The Century, to which he contributed illustrations, and Crane became fascinated by a series of Civil War memoirs that it published. But he felt that the recollections lacked immediacy: “I wonder that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps!” Between the summer of 1893 and the spring of 1894, as he wrote “The Red Badge of Courage,” Crane imagined these feelings so thoroughly that he fooled some reviewers. “The extremely vivid touches of detail convince us that he has had personal experience of the scenes he depicts,” a critic wrote in the Saturday Review. When Crane’s narrator explains that the men in Fleming’s regiment don’t yet look battle-hardened, because, despite several long marches, “there was too great a similarity in the hats,” it sounds like an observation that only someone on the spot could have made. When Fleming, hiking back toward the front, gets caught in some brambles, the sense that they are holding him back makes him think that “Nature could not be quite ready to kill him.” The thought is so peculiar and so striking that it seems reasonable to conclude that Crane himself must once have been in similar circumstances.

Crane told a journalist, “I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field,” which may have been a joke. His explanation to Willa Cather was that “he had been unconsciously working the details of the story out through most of his boyhood,” in fantasies about men on his father’s side of the family who had been soldiers: an ancestral Stephen Crane had served in the Continental Congress, and he and his sons had fought in the Revolutionary War. Photography might have been another source. Because exposure times in the eighteen-sixties were too long to capture soldiers in combat, the iconic images of the Civil War are of corpses after battle. When Crane writes, of the torn sole of a soldier’s shoe, that death “exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends,” or when he writes that on the face of another dead soldier “there was an astonished and sorrowful look, as if he thought some friend had done him an ill turn,” it is easy to imagine him studying the images of Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner.

The heart of his realism, however, is psychological rather than photographic. As a contemporary critic put it, “He stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man, and then admits you as to a theatre.” Before Fleming’s courage is tested, his mind is a porridge of sophomoric generalizations (“Greeklike struggles would be no more”) and schoolboyish anxiety about his potential for valor (“He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run”). In the moment of running away, he doesn’t think much at all, forming only a single mental impression: a lieutenant who waves a sword in an attempt to stop him must be “a peculiar creature to feel interested in such matters upon this occasion.” Alienation sets in only after Fleming’s flight. “He could never be like them,” Crane writes of Fleming’s state of mind when he sees a column of undisgraced soldiers. “He could have wept in his longings.” Crane may have been drawing on the mind-set of the sinner as expounded to him during his Methodist childhood: a sin harms the sinner by making him believe that he’s no longer worthy of God’s grace or of Christian fellowship.