Stephen Crane

At the age of three, Stephen Crane taught himself to read and wrote letters for his father to enclose to his grandmother. As a four-year-old boy, he read James Fennimore Cooper’s novels, passed down from his brothers who had to sneak them into the strict Methodist household. Stephen started writing stories at eight, had written his first poem at six, produced his first fully realized short story at 13, his first newspaper feature at 15, and articles for the “New York Tribune” at 16. When he was 22, he published his first novel, “Maggie, Girl of the Streets,” and his second, “The Red Badge of Courage,” when he was 24.
He was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871 to a religious, but literary family. The 14th child of a Methodist minister, he was named for a Revolutionary War soldier ancestor. Death was no stranger to the young Stephen Crane. Five of the Crane children died in childhood and Jonathan Townley Crane, his father, died when Stephen was only eleven years old.
Mary Helen Peck Crane, Stephen’s mother, was a graduate of Rutgers Female Institute and herself the daughter of a Methodist minister, George Peck, editor of “The Methodist Quarterly Review.” Jonathan Townley Crane, in addition to heavy tomes on deep theological issues, wrote moral tales for children. One of Stephen’s sisters wrote fiction for women’s magazines, such as “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Gazette,” a brother was a reporter and editor, and an uncle was a poet. Stephen’s mother wrote popular, folksy articles on housewifery for local newspapers. Of all the “writing Cranes” before Stephen, his mother is judged to have been the most talented.
The Crane family spent summers in Ocean Grove, the Methodist tent revival summer community at the Jersey Shore. Helen Crane was an early member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and drew large audiences to her frequent lectures on the evils of alcohol. The mother’s good influence eluded her son, Stephen, who at the age of seven was known to take the occasional beer and smoked cigarettes.
Soon after her husband’s death in 1880, Helen Crane moved her large family to Asbury Park, the seaside resort town across Wesley Lake from Ocean Grove. Stephen’s brother, Townley, and sister, Nellie, both were now married and living in Asbury Park. His sister, Agnes, changed teaching jobs to move back in with her mother and Stephen.
Helen bought a clapboard house called Arbutus Cottage at 508 Fourth Avenue. She was promptly elected president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for Ocean Grove and Asbury Park. Townley was running the Long Branch departments of both the “Tribune” and the Associated Press, and was editor of the “Asbury Park Press.”
But death followed the family to Asbury Park. Townley’s wife, Fannie, died of Bright’s Disease in 1883, soon after the deaths of two of her children. A year later, Stephen’s beloved sister Agnes died of cerebral meningitis. And then his brother, Luther, was found near death of an overdose of laudanum at Arbutus Cottage. Stephen’s own health had never been strong, although he would push himself to the end of his physical endurance to prove his strength.
Stephen wrote his first fully realized short story, “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle,” as a 13-year-old student in the Asbury Park public school, about two country bumpkins who visit the big city. A year later, he was sent to the religious boarding school, Pennington Seminary in Pennington. Soon after he left Asbury Park in 1885, his mother suffered a nervous breakdown that enfeebled her, and his 23-year-old brother, Luther, was killed when he fell in front of a train.
Stephen returned to spend summers in Asbury Park, the local press reporting that he “would spend his vacation at his mother’s pleasant home on 4th Avenue.” Helen was now working as a reporter for the “New York Tribune,” and Stephen took up feature writing for a local paper called the “Daily Spray.” His first newspaper piece, a comic tale with no byline, was entitled “Asbury’s New Move,” and told of lovers being ordered off the beach at Asbury Park by a kind of morality police. It was a bit risqué for the Methodist enclaves of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park and drew some criticism and controversy, but as it was unsigned was not directly connected to Stephen.
At Christmas, Stephen was in trouble at Pennington for hazing another student. He denied it, but walked out of the school, and returned to Asbury Park. He was next sent to the Claverack College and Hudson River Institute in New York to train for West Point, where he mostly chased girls, skipped class, and read poetry, although he took his military training seriously. The school newspaper dubbed him the “Stephen Cranium,” and a classmate later wrote, “Only women and other hero worshippers ever really liked him.”
He caused quite a stir in Asbury Park when he returned home for summer vacation dressed in his stylish uniform and with the rank of corporal. That year, 1888, Frances E. Willard was a summer guest of Helen’s at Arbutus Cottage. The morality police was ever more in evidence and the sister towns on the Atlantic Ocean were embroiled in a great controversy over bathing suits. The chief of police in Asbury Park was compelled to intercept improperly dressed bathers before they went in swimming. Ocean Grove that summer banned the sale of novels.
Stephen combed what he called “the seething summer city” of Asbury Park for stories to file with the “Tribune,” mainly poking fun at the foibles of Christian folk at play and worship, but producing miniature portraits of Shore life infused with wit and sophistication.
In the summer of 1890, Helen published a booklet about the oldest cottage in Ocean Grove and two humorous stories on family life. Stephen began earning his own bylines at the “Journal,” but found his Shore beat dull. He left Claverack that fall for engineering college in Pennsylvania and left there to study literature at Syracuse University in upstate New York. Although it was at Syracuse Stephen began writing in earnest, in 1891 he declared college a waste of time and left Syracuse determined to be a full time journalist.
That June he took a camping trip with friends to the woods of Sullivan County, New York. It was a place where the Crane family had camped when Stephen was a small boy and he took renewed interest in the place and the old timers’ yarns and local folk tales. This idyll in the forest would result in his “Tales of Sullivan County.”
Compared with the plain folk of Sullivan County, the summer denizens of Asbury Park and Ocean Grove struck Stephen as “a wriggling, howling mass of humanity.” In contrast to his respectful treatment of the country people of the backwoods, his coverage of the seaside resorts and its summer population turned satirical and ironic. “Parties from the hotel,” he wrote, “go on long pedestrian tours along the banks of the Shark River, and create havoc among the blithesome crabs and festive oysters.” Parties of painters along the riverbank under white umbrellas, he called “a bunch of extraordinary mushrooms.”
Meanwhile, he was writing at Asbury Park his first Sullivan County tales, “Hunting Wild Hogs” and “The Last of the Mohicans,” and his first novel, “Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.” In August, Stephen covered a lecture by journalist and author Hamlin Garland at neighboring Avon-By-The-Sea and Stephen struck his first literary friendship.
When the 1891 summer season ended, after a short camping trip, Stephen pulled up stakes in Asbury Park and moved into his brother’s house near Paterson, from which he began making frequent trips into Manhattan, exploring the low life of Bowery saloons, dancehalls, flophouses and brothels, and beginning his life as a full time writer.
Helen Crane died on December 7, 1891, and her will probated in January 1892, provided Stephen with a small annual income, permitting him to continue working on “Maggie.”
And then at Asbury Park in the summer of 1892, Stephen Crane fell deeply in love.
Lily Brandon Munroe was the young wife of a wealthy geologist who was frequently away on business trips. She was staying at the Lake Avenue Hotel where the press bureau was also located and where Stephen worked. They scandalized the staid seashore resort as they spent the summer together strolling the boardwalk, attending dances, and sitting on the beach. Despite the disapproval of both their families, Stephen begged Lily to run off with him and she seriously considered doing it.
Despite his lovemaking, Stephen had a prolific writing summer. He filed ten reports on Asbury Park, wrote a New York story for the “Tribune,” and continued to work on his novel. His reporting on the resort doings had become even more daring. He took on James Bradley, the Christian founder of Asbury Park, and his penchant for posting signs like “Keep off the grass.” Stephen wrote an imaginary Bradley sign that said, “Don’t go in the water attired merely in a tranquil smile.”
But it was writing about the American Day Parade of the United American Mechanics that was his undoing in Asbury Park. Offended at the sight of the wealthy, fashionably dressed onlookers who viewed the marching workers, he tossed off a scathing review for the “Tribune,” concluding that “The bona fide Asbury Parker is a man to whom a dollar, when held close to his eye, often shuts out any impression he may have had that other people possess rights.” He said of the resort city, "Asbury Park creates nothing. It does not make; it merely amuses."
Asbury Park was not amused.
The owner of the “Tribune,” Whitelaw Reid, happened to be running for vice president on the Republican ticket. The scandal that ensued over Stephen’s American Day Parade piece was said to have cost the Republicans the presidential election of 1892. Needless to say, Stephen was fired and found nobody else would hire him.
He moved into a cheap apartment on Avenue A in New York with a group of students to live in poverty. He commenced his bohemian crawl through the Lower East Side that infused his story of the young prostitute, Maggie, with so much realism. Too much realism, as it turned out, for publisher after publisher who soundly rejected the book as “ugly.”
His annuity from his mother’s estate having run out, Stephen was penniless, freezing, and ill, when Arbutus Cottage was sold in the winter of 1893. He took every penny of his seventh share in the house in Asbury Park, about $1000, and had his first novel privately printed. Seven years later, he was dead of tuberculosis in the Black Forest of Germany. At his own request, he was buried with his family at Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, New Jersey.
In the few, short years he had left after “Maggie,” Stephen Crane had written more than a dozen books. He is credited with the introduction of social realism into American literature.
The house, Arbutus Cottage, still stands on Fourth Avenue in Asbury Park. In 1995 it was slated for demolition and saved at the last minute by a couple named Hayes, who cared only that the house that nurtured the craft of a great American writer be preserved as a memorial. They purchased the dilapidted house for $7,000, the exact price paid for it by Helen Peck Crane 102 years before.
Today it is a museum maintained entirely by volunteers and supported by local businesses. It is the only memorial, in fact, to Stephen Crane in the State of New Jersey.