The Open Boat Stephen Crane Essay

Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871 to a Mary Helen Peck Crane and the Reverend Jonathan Towley Crane (1, 348). He was the youngest of fourteen children in the religious family (1, 349). Crane briefly attended both Lafayette College and Syracuse University, but left each school after one semester due to his poor academic performance (3, 2). He eventually returned to New Jersey and began working for his brother as a reporter for the New York Tribune (2, 2). During this time he published several novels including, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and The Red Badge of Courage, and his first book of poetry, The Black Riders (1, 2). As a newspaper reporter and fiction author, Crane often wrote about war, but had never experienced it firsthand (6.3).

While on his way to Cuba in 1897, Crane’s ship, the Commodore, sank off the coast of Florida leaving him stranded at sea for thirty hours in a small boat with three other men (4, 1). Crane first reported about the shipwreck in the newspaper article titled, “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” (13, 331), and later adapted this report into what is considered to be his best short story, “The Open Boat” (4, 2). Crane and his wife, Cora Taylor, moved to Greece in 1897 to report on the fighting between the Greeks and the Turks and then moved to England (3, 6) where he died from tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-eight (4,3). The poet, John Berryman, describes Stephen Crane as “probably the greatest American story-writer, he stands as an artist not far below Hawthorne and James, he is one of our few poets, and one of the few manifest geniuses the country has produced” (15,