Stephen Crane  (1871-1900) The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky LINKS Perspectives in American Literature: A Research and Reference Guide http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap6/crane.html Developed by Paul Reuben at California State University, Stanislaus, this online project offers study materials on a wide array of writers. The chapter on American Modernism and the page on Stephen Crane includes an extensive bibliography and some background information. BIOGRAPHY Stephen Crane (1871–1900)  Born in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth and youngest child of a Methodist minister who died when Stephen was nine years old, Crane was raised by his strong-minded mother. His brief college career, first at Lafayette College and then at Syracuse University, was dominated by his interest in baseball; he left college after two semesters, and moved on to a bohemian life in New York City. There he wandered through the slums, observing and developing a strong sympathy for the underclass of boozers and prostitutes that inhabited the Bowery. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), described the inevitable consequences of grinding poverty—but no publisher would take a chance on Crane's bleak and biting vision. He published it at his own expense, but it found no audience. Without any military experience, and at the age of twenty-four, Crane produced The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a novel that made him famous and became an American classic. For the remainder of his life, he traveled about the world as a writer and war correspondent. He died of a tubercular infection in Badenweiler, Germany. Despite the brevity of his writing career, Crane left behind a substantial volume of work that includes a number of brilliant short stories and innovative poems.