Books: Young Man in a Hurry

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Crane was patently a born rebel who delighted in scandalizing his age. But the clearest—and most surprising—picture that emerges from Stallman's meticulous fact-finding is that Crane was not the starving garret poet of popular legend. At his peak, he was well-paid. Convivial and generous, he virtually gave his money away. He was lionized as a celebrity when most of his contemporaries had scarcely finished college. But he was also a frail and sickly young man, and he did have a presentiment that his life-span would be short. He labored desperately to get down on paper the stories and observations that pressed on his mind like ghosts demanding to be exorcised. "Here is a writer," said his great champion, William Dean Howells, in 1893, "who has sprung into life fully armed."

Mystical Dream. Crane was also a serious writer whose only compulsion was to portray life honestly. At his best, he wrote a bold, uncluttered, staccato prose that, like the young Hemingway's, eventually changed both the rhythm and content of American fiction. At the core of that achievement was The Red Badge of Courage, that wholly intuitive, almost mystical dream of war dredged up from his subconscious when he was only 22.

Perhaps Crane's greatest misfortune was to be born in the U.S. of the 1890s. In a later, more generous age, he could undoubtedly have earned enough money to live well—probably even enough to keep his devoted but high-living mistress in style in the English manor house they occupied before his last illness. As it was, when the tree-blasting lightning struck, he went placidly and obediently, his dog Sponge at his bedside, fully aware, as Willa Gather once said, that "all his life was a preparation for sudden departure."