The Night Sides Of City Life

First published in 1893, when Stephen Crane was only twenty-one years old, Maggie is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s fall into prostitution and destitution in New York City's notorious Bowery slum. In dazzlingly vivid prose and with a sexual candour remarkable for his day, Crane depicts an urban sub-culture awash with alcohol and patrolled by the swaggering gangland "tough." Presented here with its companion piece George’s Mother and a selection of Crane’s other Bowery stories, this edition of Maggie includes a detailed introduction that places the novel in its social, cultural, and literary contexts. The appendices provide an unrivalled range of documentary sources covering such topics as religious and civic reform writing, slum fiction, the "new journalism," and literary realism and naturalism. An up-to-date bibliography of scholarly work on Crane is also included.

Between 1882 and 1920, settlers from Ontario established social and economic structures at Abernethy, Saskatchewan. By virtue of hard work, perseverance, and the critical advantage of having arrived first, they transformed the Pheasant Plains into a prosperous farming community. This book traces the area's political and economic development.

This book examines what literature and film reveal about the urban USA. Subjects include culture, class, race, crime, and disaster.

The publication of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 brought Stephen Crane instant fame at age 23. At 28, he was dead. In the brief span of his literary career, Crane enjoyed a significant measure of renown as well as notoriety, but his reputation rested almost entirely upon his war novel, and he felt that his talent had ultimately been misjudged. From his adolescence until his death, Crane was a professional journalist. To this day, most educated American readers know him only as the author of the most realistic Civil War novel ever written, three or four action-packed short stories, and a handful of iconoclastic free-verse poems. Crane was befriended and admired by some of the most important literary figures of his time, such as William Dean Howells, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and H. G. Wells. He has also been called a realist, a naturalist, an impressionist, a symbolist, and an existentialist. This reference book provides a more complete picture of Crane's short but furiously creative life and encourages a more extensive appreciation of his works. The volume includes hundreds of entries for members of Crane's immediate and extended family; close friends and associates; educational institutions that he attended; places where he resided; publishers and syndicates by whom he was employed; literary movements with which he is usually associated; and the works of fiction, poetry, and journalism that he wrote. Thus the book shows that he was a pioneer in the development of a number of genres in modern American fiction and poetry; that he was the first literary chronicler of the burgeoning slums of urban America who refused to sentimentalize his materials; that his Western stories reveal the steady retreat of the American frontier before the encroachments of a modern Europeanized civilization; and that his short stories and poems engage a number of enduring themes. Many of the entries cite works for further reading, and the volume includes a chronology and a bibliography of the most important studies of his life and writing.