Word: craning
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Only horses, dogs and children got very close to Stephen Crane while he lived. In the half century since his death, two biographers have tried to crash the circle. Thomas Beer's study in 1923 recreated the '90s more vividly than it did Crane. Poet John Berryman sticks closer to his subject, but the reader may still wonder occasionally whether he is on the trail of a man or a mirage...
...Stephen Crane was born in Newark in 1871. He was the frail 14th child of a gentle Methodist pastor named Jonathan and an unyielding force of nature named Mary. "You could argue just as well with a wave," her favorite son once said. Baby Stephen's first intelligible query is supposed to have been: "Ma, how do you spell O?" He was obviously destined to be a writer. When he died of tuberculosis at 28, he had been that and other things...
...money, generous. One sued him; another just missed him with a knife; still another married him, or at least they lived together as man & wife. Cora Taylor was devoted to him, but only a romp with his tiny nieces ever brought a smile to the face of Stephen Crane. His life had a kind of luckless ill grace as if he had been selected fate's prize guinea...
...fiction. The core of that achievement is the self-explanatory novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, and a handful of poems and stories, notably The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky. Written when Crane was 22, The Red Badge was a brilliantly intuitive study of war and the emotions of men in combat, by a man who had yet to see a battlefield...
...Crane's only esthetic creed was "honesty." He did much to release American fiction from the cocoon of euphemism and sentimentality. Technically, he was an Impressionist. Like Flaubert, Chekhov and James, he aimed for "the immediate sense of life, not the removed report." He himself never achieved that summit of craft where art appears to be artless. His oddly arresting similes and metaphors jut up like boulders deflecting the clear stream of his narratives. Many a sentence of Crane's is beaded with the sweat that went into its construction. Despite these deficiencies, his pages twang with...