Customer Reviews (2)

The sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer
John Berryman ( Dreamsongs) was one of America's finest poets. He began as a literary critic and this thorough work on the life of Cranecontains both a solid biography and considerable literary criticism of Crane's work.
He writes of Crane as a young , rebelious genius, who had his own way of seeing things. He traces in detail the journalistic career of Crane which led him not simply to the Bowery and East Side, but to battlefieds in Greece and Cuba. He analyzes to a degree Crane's masterpiece ' The Red Badge of Courage' Here is his brief description of the work. "The Red Badge of Courage is the story of the mind of a new young Northern soldier as it accustoms itself to war during two days in and out of his first battle. There is a preliminary debate within himself as to whether he will run away or not. When his regiment is charged a second time, hye does, and hides resentfully in a wood, where he meeta a rotting corpse in a chapellike place. He joins the march of wounded away from the battle and comes on a friend hurt horribly, a tall soldier, whom he accompanies to his extraordinary death.A tattered man has befriended him on the march, this man, whose plight is very bad, his mind wandering, the youth deserts in shame, on the question reiterated, of where he is wounded. Then in a flight of the troops he is clubbed with a rifle when he tries to ask a panic- stricken man a question. An unseen man finally helps him back to his regiment.Since it has got scattered during the battle his shame is unknown:he says he was shot and is cared for by a friend, a loud youth who bandages his bloody head.He sleeps. Next morning he feels no remorsek and is full of "self-pride" even, when the loud youth reluctantly and shamefacedly has to ask for the return of a packet of papers given the youth in fear, before the battle."He had been possessed of much fear of his friend, for he saw how easily questionings could make holes in his feelings." Now "his heart grew more strong and stut.He had never been compelled to blush in such a manner for his acts' he was an individual of extraordinary virtues." In the battle of this second day he is a war devil.During the charge, when the color- bearer is killed, he wrenches the flag free and bears it. In hard new fighting he and the loud youth are commended. The regiment takes a fence and a flag, and rests. "He had been to touch the great death and found, that after all, it was but the great death . He was a a man ...Scars faded as flowers"
One of the great praises of 'The Red Badge of Courage' is how Crane who had never experienced war, managed to write of it more realistically than so many who it had. This ' ironic realism' of Crane, this daring way of seeing and imagining reality were distinctive of his genius.
This is a very good book. And it also contains Berryman's critical readings of Crane's quite strange and wholly unique poetry.

Milestone in Crane Studies
Now going on 60 years old, this was poet Berryman's doctoral thesis.It remains a milestone study on Crane, and in American literature studies generally for its acute insights.It stands up quite well to most Crane studies since; though more "facts" have emerged, they do not greatly alter the essential portrait.A good complement to Berryman's book is Robert Stallman's, which sets Crane in the context of his fantastic end-of-a-century day.But to get at the core of the creative genius it really takes another, and while some of Berryman's views are still controversial, there can be little arguing with most of it.

Crane wrote two short novel masterpieces, Maggie and the Red Badge, and several of the best stories in modern English to date in a short span of about 8 years.Berryman deftly mixes biography with literary criticism of these works in a sound scholarly way unfortunately no longer fashionable.His bow to the ethos of his own times is a Freudian chapter at the end, which you can take or mostly leave.Its placement is simultaneously shrewd and cynical; an obvious bow to Berryman's teachers' demands, but to any other reader as detatchable as a coupon.It therefore does not mar the otherwise deep meditation on this mercurial personality, who Berryman characterizes as a "volcanic" natural talent from whom words flowed like lava. Berryman believes Crane was likely to have dwarfed most other American novelists had he lived and produced beyond his mere 30 years.While such speculations are often a distraction, his affinity with Crane turns them into a compelling meditation on where American literature was shortly to go:to World War I and Paris.

Berryman, even without his subsequent poetic output, was an important critic, and this book also serves as the proper starting point to his own double career.Work on Crane still needed to be defended when Berryman wrote in 1950 -- he has lasted 50 years since his writing, Berryman pronounces, setting a yardstick and defense.Now, ironically, his own fine book has met the same test of time. ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. This 80-page adaptation has been painstakingly edited to retain the integrity of the original work, and to convey a sense of the author's style and the novel's theme. A low reading level assures success and stimulates a desire for further exploration of this classic tale. ... Read more

Product Description
1923. If the definition that man is a laughing animal is true, then Crane was neither one nor the other. He was but a hurried visitor on this earth on which he had so little reason to be joyous. His first novel, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets", was considered a signpost in the development of literary realism and he also wrote many short stories in an impressionistic style. Crane spent two years as a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba. This is a wonderful biographical account of the man and his life. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Interesting biography of a hard subject
This is the first biography and one of the few available about Steven Crane, published about a decade after his death, by a personal associate of Crane's (Thomas Beer - a contemporary author in his own right).Beer does a good job at dispelling popular myths at the time of Crane's death aboutCrane's life.Probably of most interest to those reading Crane's work andwish to know more about Crane.Published in 1933. ... Read more

Product Description
Explores the twenty-eight-year life of Stephen Crane, who transformed modern literature after rebelling against his father's puritanical view of the world and embarking on exciting journeys that provided him with background for his novels. ... Read more

Product Description
Little-known writings show how a rich family literory heritage influenced Stephen Crane's formative years, brief maturity, and artistry. Stephen Crane was a prodigious American author whose bohemian ways seemed to contradict his conscientious upbringing. Drawing on little-known and unpublished documents by Crane's father, mother, and sister, and preeminent scholar Thomas A. Gullason shows how their vitality and versatility galvanized Crane's imagination, spurred his literary career, and affected his lifestyle. The Cranes emerge as a spirited and serious lot who were passionately concerned with social and cultural issues of the day. Newly discovered papers - from reflections on the Civil War to a funeral oration for Lincoln - paint Crane's pastor father as a man of sardonic wit whose obsession with alcohol would be mirrored in his son's work. Crane's mother is revealed to have had an eye for politics and an ear for dialogue that would vastly inform Crane's masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage. His sister Agnes rounds out the portrait with recently recovered stories and poems.Replete with rare works and keen insights, this edition is a crucial reference for students of nineteenth-century American literature and devotees of Stephen Crane. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills. ... Read more

Product Description
Stephen Crane provides a general overview of all of Stephen Crane's major works, most notably The Red Badge of Courage the work that arguably shaped Crane's reputation, and many of his minor ones. It seeks to understand the many literary genres in which Crane wrote: newspaper journalism, novels, poetry, sketch and short story. ... Read more