Prose and Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets / The Red Badge of Courage / Stories, Sketches, Journalism, The Black Riders / War Is Kind

By Stephen Crane

Book Overview

Here in one volume are all of Stephen Crane's best-known works, including the novels The Red Badge of Courage, about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl's fall; George's Mother, about New York's Bowery and its effect on a young workingman; The Third Violet, about a bohemian artist's country romance; and The Monster, a novella about sacrifice and rescue. The stories collected here include masterpieces like "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes to the Yellow Sky," as well as tales of childhood in small-town America. In his journalism, the best of which is presented here, Crane covered the Spanish-American and Grego-Turkish wars, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life. The volume concludes with The Black Riders and War Is Kind, collections of epigrammatic free verse that look back to Emily Dickinson and forward to Imagism.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0940450178
• ISBN13: 9780940450172
• Release Date: August 1984
• Publisher: Library of America
• Length: 1379 Pages
• Weight: 2.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.2" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Conjures up Images that Stay with You

His prose is excellent, but his poetry (the black riders / war is kind) is what stays with me. The striking images, dark humor and subversive fight against authority bring me back to the book decade after decade. These aren't Shakespearean sonnets; if he was born a hundred years later he would be channeling his raw feelings into writing lyrics for Rage Against the Machine. His poetry seems so modern it is hard to reconcile it with the completely different feel of The Red Badge of Courage and his splendid Spanish American War reporting.

The great American war novel plus

This volume contains all of Crane's major writings. I believe it is fair to say that it is 'The Red Badge of Courage' that gives Crane his place in the American pantheon. This is arguably the finest war novel ever written by an American. Its imaginative construction of the inner conflict of a young dreamer when confronted with the reality of battle-and the redemptive aftermath is a tautly and beautifully written realistic , moral drama. Its perception of the part imagination plays in our apprehension of reality connects it with a long tradition of the novel from 'Quixote' to ' Lord Jim'. Crane like Keats was a literary fire that burned briefly but deeply and intensely.