1
Born on the Day of the Dead and dead five months before his twenty-ninth birthday, Stephen Crane lived five months and five days into the twentieth century, undone by tuberculosis before he had a chance to drive an automobile or see an airplane, to watch a film projected on a large screen or listen to a radio, a figure from the horse-and-buggy world who missed out on the future that was awaiting his peers, not just the construction of those miraculous machines and inventions but the horrors of the age as well, including the destruction of tens of millions of lives in two world wars. His contemporaries were Henri Matisse (twenty-two months older than he was), Vladimir Lenin (seventeen months older), Marcel Proust (four months older), and such American writers as W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Robert Frost, all of whom carried on well into the new century. But Crane’s work, which shunned the traditions of nearly everything that had come before him, was so radical for its time that he can be regarded now as the first American modernist, the man most responsible for changing the way we see the world through the lens of the written word.
He took his first breath on Mulberry Place in Newark, New Jersey, the ninth surviving child of the fourteen offspring born to his devout Methodist parents, Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane, and because his father was a minister who traveled from parish to parish in the later years of his long pastoral career, the boy grew up without the standard attachments to place, schools, and friends, moving at age three from Newark to Bloomington (now called South Bound Brook), at age five from Bloomington to Paterson, at age seven leaving Paterson for his father’s next post as head of the congregation at Drew Methodist Church in Port Jervis, New York, a town of nine thousand people situated at the tristate juncture of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, where the Delaware and Neversink Rivers converge, and then, when his sixty-year-old father died suddenly of a heart attack three months after Crane’s eighth birthday, the family was compelled to leave the parsonage, with his mother moving to Roseville, New Jersey, an unincorporated community/neighborhood within Newark bordering Bloomfield and East Orange, and the boy and his brother Edmund (older than Crane by fourteen years) going off to live with relatives on a farm in Sussex County, all of them eventually regrouping in Port Jervis to live with another brother, William (older by seventeen years), after which, in 1883, his mother bought a house in the resort town of Asbury Park, New Jersey (“The Summer Mecca of American Methodism”), where the teenage Crane began his career as a writer by composing summer holiday squibs for yet another one of his brothers (Townley, older by eighteen years), who ran a local news agency for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press. By then, two more of Crane’s siblings had died: In 1884, his twenty-eight-year-old sister Agnes Elizabeth, a schoolteacher and short story writer who had been as much a mother to him as his own mother and had encouraged his interest in books, was killed by meningitis, and, in 1886, his twenty-three-year-old brother Luther was crushed to death when he fell under a moving train while working as a flagman and brakeman on the Erie Railroad. After one disaffected and aborted year as a college student (a single semester at Lafayette followed by another semester at Syracuse, where he played on the baseball team and registered for just one course), Crane headed back south to the twin destinations of Asbury Park and New York City, determined to make his way as a professional writer. He was not yet twenty years old. On September twenty-eighth, just blocks away from where Crane would soon be living in Manhattan, the unread and all but forgotten Herman Melville died. On November tenth, thousands of miles to the east in Marseille, France, Arthur Rimbaud died at the age of thirty-seven. Twenty-seven days after that, Crane’s sixty-four-year-old mother died of cancer. The newly orphaned budding writer had only eight and a half more years to live himself, but in that short time he produced one masterpiece of a novel (The Red Badge of Courage), two boldly imagined and exquisite novellas (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Monster), close to three dozen stories of unimpeachable brilliance (among them “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel”), two collections of some of the strangest, most savage poems of the nineteenth century (The Black Riders and War Is Kind), and more than two hundred pieces of journalism, many of them so good that they stand on equal footing with his literary work. A burning boy of rare precociousness who was blocked from entering the fullness of adulthood, he is America’s answer to Keats and Shelley, to Schubert and Mozart, and if he continues to live on as they do, it is because his work has never grown old. One hundred and twenty years after his death, Stephen Crane continues to burn.
2
It could be that I am exaggerating somewhat. That Crane continues to burn is not in question, but whether he lives on as brightly as those other too soon extinguished burning boys is less clear. Once upon a time, almost every high school student in America was required to read The Red Badge of Courage. I was fifteen when I first encountered the novel in 1962, and it was an explosive, life-altering discovery for me, as it was for most of my classmates (boys and girls alike), but now, for reasons I find difficult to understand, the book seems to have fallen off the required reading lists, which has the double effect of depriving young students of an important literary experience and relegating Crane to the shadows, for if my classmates and I hadn’t been exposed to The Red Badge of Courage, it is doubtful we would have taken the initiative to look into other works by Crane, the poems, for example (which can cause a sudden, general shock to the system), or the short stories, or the brutal depiction of New York slum life in Maggie. My evidence is purely anecdotal, but when I recently asked my thirty-year-old daughter if she had been assigned the book in high school, she said no, which led me to begin an informal survey of her friends, fifteen or twenty young men and women who had gone to high schools in various far-flung parts of the country, asking them the same question I had asked her, and one by one they all said no as well. Even more surprising, only one of my literary acquaintances from non-English-speaking countries has ever heard of Crane, which is also true for the vast majority of my English acquaintances, even though Crane was just as celebrated in England as he was in America during his lifetime. My non-American friends are familiar with Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, and the once neglected Melville and Dickinson, but Crane, who deserves to stand among those gods (in my opinion), is a cipher to them.
That isn’t to say that Crane no longer exists. His principal writings are readily available in numerous paperback editions, his collected works, published in ten volumes by the University Press of Virginia in the 1970s, are still in print, there is an excellent gathering of his selected prose and poetry that runs close to fourteen hundred pages from the Library of America, his novels and stories continue to be taught in college courses on American literature, and there is a veritable industry of Stephen Crane scholarship in the academic world. All that is reassuring, but at the same time I feel that Crane is now in the hands of the specialists, the lit majors and PhD candidates and tenured professors, while the invisible army of so-called general readers, that is, people who are not academics or writers themselves, the same people who still take pleasure in reading old standbys such as Melville and Whitman, are no longer reading Crane.
If it had been otherwise, I never would have thought of writing this book.
I come at it not as a specialist or a scholar but as an old writer in awe of a young writer’s genius. Having spent the past two years poring over every one of Crane’s works, having read through every one of his published letters, having snatched up every piece of biographical information I could put my hands on, I find myself just as fascinated by Crane’s frantic, contradictory life as by the work he left us. It was a weird and singular life, full of impulsive risks, an often pulverizing lack of money, and a pigheaded, intractable devotion to his calling as a writer, which flung him from one unlikely and perilous situation to the next—a controversial article written at twenty that disrupted the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York Police Department that effectively exiled him from the city in 1896, a shipwreck off the coast of Florida that led to his near drowning in 1897, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdy house, the Hotel de Dreme, work as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War in Cuba (where he repeatedly stood in the line of enemy fire), and then his final years in England, where Joseph Conrad was his closest friend and Henry James wept over his early death—and this writer, who is best known as a chronicler of war, embraced many other subjects as well, handling them all with immense skill and originality, from stories about young children and struggling bohemian artists to firsthand accounts of New York opium dens, conditions in a Pennsylvania coal mine, and a devastating drought in Nebraska, and much like Edgar Allan Poe, often mistakenly identified as nothing more than our dark-browed purveyor of horror and mystery when in fact he was a master humorist as well, the somber, pessimistic Crane could be hilariously funny when he chose to be. And underneath the mountain of his prose, or perhaps on top of it, there are his poems, which few people in or out of the academy have ever known quite what to do with, poems so far from the traditional norms of nineteenth-century verse-making—including the norm-breaking deviations of Whitman and Dickinson—that they scarcely seem to count as poetry at all, and yet they stay in the mind more persistently than most other American poems I can think of, as for example this one, which has continued to haunt me ever since I first read it more than five decades ago:
In the desert
I saw 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.”
3
Before tackling Crane himself, a brief pause to survey the American landscape as it looked between 1871 and 1900, to situate our subject in the time and space he inhabited.
Among the new things that entered the world during those years, a partial list would include the following: barbed wire, earmuffs, the grain silo, blue jeans, the jockstrap, the mimeograph machine, the telephone, the dry-cell battery, the phonograph, the cable car, Heinz ketchup, Budweiser beer, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, the cash register, the typewriter, the incandescent lightbulb, the carpet sweeper, the Transcontinental Express (New York to San Francisco in 83½ hours), moving pictures, the player piano, the electric iron, the fountain pen, the flexible film roll, the all-purpose fixed-focus camera, the self-powered machine gun, the revolving door, the AC motor and transformer, the paper clip, saltwater taffy, the skyscraper, the slot machine, the drinking straw, the Flexible Flyer sled, the pay telephone, the safety razor, the electric fan, the electric chair, the blowtorch, the Linotype machine, the trolley car, cornflakes, the ceiling fan, color photography, the automatic telephone exchange, the milking machine, Coca-Cola, wireless telegraphy, the dishwasher, the X-ray, basketball, the comic strip, the escalator, the tabulating machine, shredded wheat, the smoke detector, the zipper, the rotary dial telephone, the bottle cap, pinking shears, the mousetrap, medical gloves, volleyball, the voting machine, the vertical filing cabinet, the modern Olympic Games, the Boston Marathon, the portable motion-picture camera, the film projector, remote control, the internal combustion engine, the flyswatter, the thumbtack, and cotton candy.
Between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the assassination of William McKinley in September 1901, which led to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Crane’s onetime friend and admiring reader, later his unbudgeable foe), the United States lived through a long period of growth, tumult, and moral failure, which transformed it from a backward, isolated country into a world power, but its leaders were mostly inept or corrupt or both, and the two great crimes embedded in the American Experiment—the enslavement of black Africans and the systematic annihilation of the continent’s first settlers, an immense array of cultures lumped under the heading Indians—were never properly addressed or atoned for, and even though slavery had been abolished, the postwar efforts at Reconstruction dribbled away into nothing by 1877, forcing the black population in the South to live under a new but equally vile system of oppression, misery, exclusion, and intimidation, even to the point of death at the end of ropes knotted by racist vigilantes from the Ku Klux Klan. As for the Indians during those years, they were slaughtered by the United States cavalry (often commanded by generals who had been Civil War heroes), and those who survived were kicked off their land and penned up in government-run reservations, remote tracts of end-of-the-world desolation and despair, the hot, hopeless regions of Hell on Earth. The Battle of Little Bighorn (a.k.a. Custer’s Last Stand) was fought in late June 1876, a week before America’s one-hundredth-anniversary celebration, and so incensed were the white citizens of the Republic over this defeat at the hands of savages such as Chief Gall, Crazy Horse, and Chief Two Moons that the emboldened army resolved to answer the Indian Question once and for all. They finally accomplished their task by mowing down a crowd of ghost-dancing men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, two months after Crane’s nineteenth birthday.
Meanwhile, the sparsely populated West was filling up with white settlers, vast numbers of Chinese were crossing the Pacific to find work in California, and the industrialized cities along the East Coast were absorbing millions of immigrants from all parts of Europe, a much-needed source of low-cost labor to toil in the factories, mills, sweatshops, and mines. Conditions were harsh for all of them. Homesteaders on the prairie often faced starvation and had to endure summer temperatures as high as one hundred degrees and winter temperatures that could sink to twenty, thirty, and sometimes forty below zero. Riots broke out in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle against the Chinese, who had to cope with unrelenting discrimination, bloody physical attacks, and spontaneous lynchings by crazed white mobs. (Anti-Chinese sentiment became so strong that in 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese workers from entering the country for the next ten years; in 1892, Congress renewed the act for another ten years.) In the case of the European immigrants, they were squeezed into stinking, airless tenements, too poor to live anywhere but in rough, dangerous slums as they worked for pennies at their twelve-hour-a-day jobs, which were often rough and dangerous as well, with no unions or labor laws to protect them. Such was city life at the bottom of the social ladder: a brave new world in which the Irish, the Germans, the Italians, the Greeks, the Scandinavians, the Hungarians, and the Poles all despised one another, and together as one they all despised the blacks and the Jews.
The rich, however, were very rich, and the richest among them, the so-called robber barons of that so-called Gilded Age, accumulated fortunes running into the hundreds of millions of dollars (the equivalent of untold billions today). Remarkably, most of their names are still familiar to us: J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Leland Stanford, and numerous others. They made their money in the railroads, in steel, in oil, in banking, and all of them were clever, single-minded whirlwinds of ambition who crushed their competitors by both legal and illegal means to attain their extraordinary power. It was the era of the trust—a new form of monopoly designed to evade the anti-monopoly laws—which was invented by one of Rockefeller’s lawyers (Samuel C. T. Dodd), and once it was put into practice in the oil industry, other industries soon followed, among them copper, steel, tobacco, sugar, rubber, leather, and even farm implements. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was supposed to put a stop to such massive concentrations of wealth, but it was weakly enforced and further undermined by a series of negative Supreme Court decisions. It was true that some of the biggest tycoons and their heirs later turned to philanthropy, but it was also true that Vanderbilt’s son William (famous for throwing the most lavish and expensive parties of the time, no doubt among the most lavish and expensive since the fall of the Roman Empire) responded to a question from a reporter about his responsibility to the public by saying, “The public be damned.” The railroad-rich Jay Gould, one of the more flamboyant crooks of nineteenth-century capitalism, is reported to have bragged, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Contrary to Gould’s assertion, members of the working class were not killing one another so much as being killed by a system designed to extract maximum profits for business owners at the expense of their employees’ health, earning power, and safety. The pushback against capitalism had begun in Europe long before the outbreak of the American Civil War, but various forms of that pushback came to the New World with the immigrants—the revolutionary socialism of Marx, the evolutionary socialism of Eduard Bernstein, the subversive doctrines of anarchism (McKinley was murdered by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz)—and on home ground indigenous opposition groups sprang up as well, some of them both progressive and reactionary at the same time, such as the Populist Party and the Grange, which defended the little man and the farmer against the depredations of big capital but turned their backs on immigrants and (no surprise) black people and Jews, but a number of more forward-looking and inclusive workers’ organizations also came into being, among them the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor (founded in 1869), which had seven hundred thousand members at its peak in the 1880s, and the American Federation of Labor (the AF of L), founded by Samuel Gompers in 1886, which fought for an eight-hour workday, the abolition of child labor, better wages, and improved working conditions. Alongside those moderate, practical goals, there were the more strident positions advanced by the Socialists (as embodied in the person of Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times), the Anarchists (notably Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, both of whom were eventually deported), and Pennsylvania Coal Country’s Molly Maguires, who terrorized the mine owners with their violent guerrilla tactics and were infiltrated and ultimately destroyed by undercover Pinkerton agents (ten were hanged for murder in June 1877). If the latter part of the nineteenth century was the era of the trusts, it was also the era of some of the most prolonged and deadly strikes in American history. The Great Strike of 1877 began in July with a walkout of workers on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then spread to other railroads from New England to the Mississippi and finally across the entire country, which led factory workers and miners to stage sympathy strikes of their own. When violence broke out in Martinsburg, West Virginia, the state militia was called in, but after the militia refused to open fire on the strikers, the secretary of war summoned federal troops to take their place. In Baltimore, nine strikers were killed and several wounded when the state militia fired point-blank into a crowd. Riots ensued, and over the next days fifty more people were killed. In Pittsburgh, the state militia and strikers exchanged gunfire, and then a real fire was set, which burgeoned into a wall of flame that extended over three miles, destroying two thousand freight cars and causing more than ten million dollars’ worth of property damage. In Chicago, local police and cavalry attacked an impromptu gathering of strikers and nineteen people were killed. Sympathy strikes continued to grow, and by the end of July forty thousand coal miners had walked off their jobs in Scranton, Pennsylvania. For all their efforts, not much improved for the railroad workers in the wake of these battles, but the Scranton miners managed to win a ten percent wage increase and other concessions from the mine owners. More to the point, the events of 1877 proved to the country that the labor movement was now large enough to have become an omnipresent force in American life.
The litany continues. In 1882: the three-month-long strike of iron and steel workers; the freight handlers strike that disrupted rail transportation for several weeks. 1886: the strike against Jay Gould’s Missouri-Pacific railroad system, during which nine thousand strikers shut down five thousand miles of track. That year, more than six hundred thousand workers in various industries went out on strike. In May, an attack on strikebreaking workers at the McCormick Reaper Manufacturing Company in Chicago elicited a response from the police that wound up killing six and wounding a dozen others, which led to the Haymarket Square riots the following afternoon, during which a bomb was thrown, killing seven policemen and wounding fifty. Four anarchists were sentenced to death and four others put in prison, three of them for life. It seems likely that none of the eight was responsible for throwing the bomb, but with newspaper headlines declaring, “TERROR GRIPS THE COUNTRY,” it hardly mattered who was responsible or not. Countless other strikes took place over the years that followed, but the biggest and most notorious among them were no doubt the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman Strike of 1894. The action against Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead mill on the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania lasted five months and led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, an emblematic instance of management’s refusal to negotiate with labor, backing up that intransigence by persuading the governor to call in seven thousand members of the state militia. Carnegie’s associate Henry Clay Frick (the same Frick who lived in the New York mansion on Fifth Avenue that housed the private art collection which has been open to the public since 1935) was responsible for calling in Pinkerton agents armed with Winchester rifles to attack the strikers, and so hated did he become among those who supported the strike that anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate him in his office, shooting Frick twice and stabbing him three times, but the attempt failed, the strike was broken, and Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. Thousands lost their jobs. In 1894, a year when three-quarters of a million workers laid down their tools in protest, the Pullman Strike in Chicago was also broken with no tangible results, but for a brief time mayhem ruled, leading to a nationwide boycott that stopped all rail traffic west of Detroit, and the leader of the insurrection, Eugene Debs, although sentenced to six months in prison for defying a federal injunction against interfering with the operation of the U.S. mail, emerged as a hero of the Left. He lived on until 1926 and is perhaps best known today for having said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Not to be forgotten in the midst of these ongoing wars between capital and labor were the ups and downs of the market itself, which crashed twice during the years in question. The Panic of 1873 forced the New York Stock Exchange to close for ten days, and in a depression that lasted for five years, more than ten thousand businesses failed, hundreds of banks shut down, and plans for a second transcontinental railroad line were scrapped. It is doubtful that the two-year-old or even six-year-old Crane was aware of what was happening then, but the Panic of 1893 was a different story. Crane was nearly twenty-two and already living in New York when the largest and deepest of all American depressions struck (surpassed only by the Great Depression of the 1930s), in the throes of the most sustained creative burst of his life (the completion and publication of Maggie, the composition of his first book of poems, the preliminary drafts of George’s Mother and The Red Badge of Courage, not to speak of various stories, sketches, and articles), and he suffered along with everyone else in the city, where unemployment oscillated between thirty and thirty-five percent, so poor at times that he had to scrounge for food and was often dressed so shabbily that he felt ashamed to go out in public.
It was also the era of Jane Addams and the settlement house movement, which began in Chicago and spread east and west to more than thirty states, an idealistic yet pragmatic effort to protect the rights of children and ameliorate conditions among the poor. The success of Hull House, the Henry Street Settlement in New York, and scores of other charitable endeavors proved that women could play a significant role in the civic life of the country. Without question, women were still relegated to the margins during those years, but a number of remarkable exceptions should be noted, women like Jane Addams who also managed to make their mark on society: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Baker Eddy, Mother Jones, Clara Barton, Madame Blavatsky, the painter Mary Cassatt, and the journalist Nellie Bly (the pen name of Elizabeth Cochran), one of America’s first and most intrepid investigative reporters, who famously pretended to be mad in order to gain admittance to an insane asylum, and then, after being released at the request of her employer, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World, exposed the wretched, inhuman treatment she had been subjected to there. She also bested Phileas Fogg’s imaginary record of circumnavigating the globe in eighty days (as recounted in Jules Verne’s novel) by completing the journey in seventy-two days. But women were also joining together to form large mass movements demanding change of the status quo, among them the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (of which Crane’s mother was an active member and served as president of three different local chapters). The union finally won its victory with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1919, ushering in the less than fondly remembered Prohibition Era, but just one year later, after making some small headway on the municipal and state levels, women’s suffrage became the law of the land, and the door that had been bolted shut for so many centuries at last began to crack open.
State universities, colleges for women, colleges for black students, private colleges founded by various religious denominations, along with the building of libraries, museums, concert halls, and opera houses radically altered America’s intellectual and cultural life, so much so that a number of black and Jewish figures eventually worked their way into prominence: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Brandeis, Abraham Cahan, and Emma Lazarus, to mention just a handful of the most recognizable names. In New York City alone, the years during which Crane lived saw the construction of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Station, the Statue of Liberty, Carnegie Hall, the American Museum of Natural History, the Columbia University campus, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s two glorious creations, Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They are all still with us today, twenty years into the twenty-first century.
And then there was the West, which would tug at the New Jersey–born Crane all his life. The years of his boyhood were saturated with the dime novels that made legends of the fighting men from the rugged frontier, the same men who evolved into the characters featured in hundreds of films throughout the twentieth century, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp, Jesse James, and the boy assassin Billy the Kid, who was gunned down by Pat Garrett in 1881 and continues to sit on his sacred throne as an American Immortal. But the West was more than just a place, it was an idea, a myth, a dream territory that belonged exclusively to the New World with no lingering ties to the European past, the land of the country’s future. When Crane traveled west in 1895 to write articles for the Bacheller Syndicate, he had never been anywhere outside of New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and he fell in love with what he saw. It was his one and only visit to the region, but it stayed with him to the end and inspired some of his most sharply written and memorable stories, “A Man and Some Others,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel.”
As for the American novelists who overlapped with Crane from the early nineties to the turn of the century, only a few of them are still read today. At the top of the list stand Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, all of whom were flourishing during those years and all of whom would come to know Crane, as well as Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Frank Norris, and Sarah Orne Jewett. In painting, some of the leading members of the Hudson River school were still alive (Thomas Moran, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt), but a younger generation had already established itself by then, and because Crane’s years in New York were spent mostly among artists, not writers, and because he learned as much about writing from looking at art as he did from reading books, the names of those artists bear mentioning: John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, James Whistler, and the two eccentric but enduring innovators who worked on past the Gilded Age into the new century, Ralph Albert Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Not least, it was the moment when Samuel S. McClure created the first international news syndicate, which coincided with the birth of large-circulation newspapers. The engine that made this possible was the newly invented Linotype machine, which worked six times faster than the handset, letter-by-letter system it replaced and allowed daily papers to publish editions that far exceeded the eight-page limit of the past. In Manhattan, Joseph Pulitzer took charge of the New York World, William Randolph Hearst assumed control of the New York Journal, and the high-pressure sweepstakes of yellow journalism began, forever changing how Americans interacted with their own universe. After Crane moved to the city in 1891/1892, he worked for all three of those men in a kind of permanent rotation until the year of his death, scratching along on the bits they paid him because he was bent on earning his living as a writer and refused to consider any other sort of work. A noble decision, perhaps, but except for a few periods of relative tranquility, he had a rough time of it until the very end.
The Linotype machine giveth, and the Linotype machine taketh away.
Copyright © 2021 by Paul Auster
