Synopses & Reviews
"A brilliant and powerful portrait of Crane that stands as a monument to biography as a literary art. Filled with fresh insights into Crane's personality, informed by an astonishing mastery of his writing, and based on exhaustive research". -- Stephen B. Oates, author of With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
World famous at twenty-four, dead at twenty-eight, brilliant, reckless, and ultimately tragic -- Stephen Crane is a dramatic study in contradictions. His most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage, is a classic antiwar novel. Yet Crane longed for military honors of his own and pursued a career as a war correspondent that took him to battlefields in Greece and Cuba. The son of a repressive Methodist minister who preached that novels were a filthy vice, he not only took up writing as a career but engaged in a public battle on behalf of a New York prostitute, which ruined his reputation and cost him the friendship of Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. An Easterner who fancied himself a cowboy, he spent his last years on a ramshackle estate in England, entertaining his close friends Joseph Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Ford.
In the first accurate, in-depth biography of this legendary writer, Linda Davis vividly describes Crane's short but endlessly fascinating life. Providing a radically new interpretation, she documents the chronic illness that plagued him from childhood and that accounted for the dramatic risks he continually undertook. Badge of Courage is the first biography to break through the common myths and misconceptions surrounding Crane and offer a full portrait of the man himself and of his literary genius.
Synopsis
World famous at twenty-four, dead at twenty-eight, brilliant, reckless, and ultimately tragic--Stephen Crane is a dramatic study in contradictions. His most famous work, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, is a classic antiwar novel. Yet Crane longed for military honors of his own and pursued a career as a war correspondent that took him to battlefields in Greece and Cuba.