The Complete Short Stories of Stephen Crane

Crane’s short fiction, collected: “The Open Boat,” written out of surviving a shipwreck off Florida in 1897; “The Blue Hotel” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” both set in a West he had actually travelled; “The Monster,” about a town turning on the man who saved a child from a fire. He wrote all of it inside a career of about nine years and died at 28.

The common thread, and the reason he is read as the central American naturalist, is that his characters’ courage and cowardice turn out to be products of circumstance rather than properties they own.

Context: Stephen Crane (1871-1900) published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets at 21 and The Red Badge of Courage at 23, worked as a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba, and died of tuberculosis in Germany at 28.

Connections

• Stephen Crane — the author.
• The Red Badge of Courage — his novel, also on this list.
• Literature