New Yorker Does Stephen Crane

Adam Gropnik reviews The Miracle of Stephen Crane Paul Auster’s “Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (which features in this post), but this being a New Yorker review it is a wide-ranging, erudite essay. I like this particular paragraph - it is good to see someone else making a connection with Hemingway:

And Auster is right: Crane counts. Everything that appeared innovative in writing which came out a generation later is present in his “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893) and “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895). The tone of taciturn minimalism that Hemingway seemed to discover only after the Great War—with its roots in newspaper reporting, its deliberate amputation of overt editorializing, its belief that sensual detail is itself sufficient to make all the moral points worth making—is fully achieved in Crane’s work. So is the embrace of an unembarrassed sexual realism in “Maggie,” which preceded Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” by almost a decade.

When I started writing again, I also started reading again to read serious literature. I set out to fill in the holes of my education. I came to think there were avenues that had been forgotten that might be still fruitful . John Dos Passos represents for me such an example and Nelson Algren as another. Crane could be another. If I were younger, I would concentrate more on Crane. Gropnik might push you to Crane and so should Auster, but let me say this: read Stephen Crane now.

sch

12/6/21