If most writers write about their experience, however disguised, Crane did the reverse: he tried to live what he’d already written. Amid the apparent hurry of his life-he once told Willa Cather during a brief assignment in the West that he didn’t have time for clean clothes or proper spelling-a peculiar pattern emerges. Levenson, editor of the excellent Library of America edition of Crane’s work, remarks. To his contemporaries Crane’s short life had some of the allure of pulp fiction “he actually lived what his average countrymen collectively dreamed,” J.C. “People may just as well discover now,” he complained in 1896, “that the high dramatic key of The Red Badge cannot be sustained.” Four years later, exhausted from covering the Spanish-American War and claiming to be “disappointed with success,” Crane died of tuberculosis in a sanitarium in the Black Forest. He recovered the intensity of The Red Badge of Courage only in a dozen superb short stories. Wells called an “orgy of praise.” During the next few years Crane worked as a journalist in New York and he wrote some now forgotten novels. There was some grumbling from the New York press (an army general, writing in The Dial, accused the British of liking the Civil War novel because its hero was a deserter from the Union Army), but The Red Badge was well received in the US and English critics indulged in what H.G. An impoverished newspaper reporter living in New York, Crane watched the machinery of fame that had been perfected by his bosses Pulitzer and Hearst go to work for him. Stephen Crane was twenty-three in the fall of 1895, when The Red Badge of Courage was published.
0 kommentar(er)
