Stephen Crane, whose likeness appears on the album cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” was America’s first rock-star writer. He self-published his realist novella “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” at 21, losing so much money that he took to starving himself and wearing rubber boots because he couldn’t afford shoes. By the time he was 23, he had imagined “a creature, naked, bestial, / Who, squatting upon the ground, / Held his heart in his hands, / And ate of it. / I said, ‘Is it good, friend?’ / ‘It is bitter — bitter,’ he answered; / ‘But I like it / Because it is bitter, / And because it is my heart.’ ”

Crane worked on “The Black Riders,” his first book of poems, while he wrote “The Red Badge of Courage.” Internationally famous after newspapers serialized “Red Badge” in 1894, he still struggled to make a living as an investigative reporter, hounded by gossip and conventional morality. The poet Hamlin Garland, an early Crane supporter and the president of the American Psychical Society, suspected Crane of automatic writing, a popular idea in an era fascinated by spiritualism. According to Paul Sorrentino’s evocative new biography, “Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire,” Garland “tested Crane by having him write a new poem on the spot. Without hesitation, out came the memorable ‘God fashioned the ship of the world,’ a bitter parody of Genesis in which ‘at fateful time’ humanity was doomed to drift ‘forever rudderless’ while ‘many in the sky / . . . laughed at this thing.’ ”

Crane was not psychic, but his life was full of fateful coincidence. Poems and first paragraphs came to him with “every word in place, every comma, every period fixed.” His synesthesia endowed sounds with colors; he had a prodigious memory and a seer’s empathy. In a span of 10 productive years, Crane wrote five novels, two books of poems, several classic stories and many journalistic sketches; he traveled “to the American West, Mexico, Cuba, the British Isles, Greece and the Continent,” Sorrentino reminds us, “at times disappearing for weeks from a biographer’s view.” Crane himself said that he could not “help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait.”

Crane is a notoriously difficult biographical subject. While Mark Twain left 50 notebooks and 28,000 letters, Crane left one thin notebook. His letters were infrequent. He kept no diaries or journals; his life was in his head. Sorrentino begins by discrediting Thomas Beer’s Crane biography, with its invented anecdotes and correspondence. (Alfred Kazin dismissed it as “clever conversation, which was Beer’s 1923 idea of a book anyway.”) Sorrentino writes, modestly, “My biography is a narrative of the available documents.” He wants to situate Crane “within social, political, religious, intellectual and historical contexts,” avoiding the doubling back of contemporaries’ accounts, whose versions changed over time. The illustrator C. K. Linson protected his close friend by retouching a photo of “Stevie” smoking a hookah at a party; the image published with Linson’s memoir shows Crane alone, smoking a pipe.