Stephen Crane

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.

~The Red Badge of Courage," written in 1895 by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest of all American novels. This is a book about the Civil War, and one Union soldier's struggle with his inner demons as he prepares for, and fights his first battle.

"Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings about New York," by Stephen Crane, is part of the "Barnes & Noble Classics"" "series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of "Barnes & Noble Classics" All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. "Barnes & Noble Classics "pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. Written before but published after "The Red Badge of Courage," Stephen Crane's "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" offers a stark image of the underbelly of urban American life at the end of the nineteenth century. Maggie Johnson, a lovely innocent too slight to carry the weight of poverty, dreams of escaping New York's Bowery and the casual cruelty of her alcoholic family. After her younger brother dies, she runs off with Pete, a bartender with pretensions to wealth and culture. But Pete himself is easily seduced by the seemingly sophisticated Nellie, and Maggie finds herself abandoned in the unforgiving metropolis. Publishers feared that Crane's portrait of brutal fathers swilling away their lives in cheap bars, drunken mothers raging at terrified children, and ruined young women walking the streets, would be more than their readers could bear. But Crane's impressionistic style and thematic intensity won the day, and "Maggie"--the author's favorite among his works--helped to shape the writers that followed him and begin the era of literary naturalism. This edition also includes the short novel George's Mother, plus "A Night at the Millionaire's Club," "Opium's Varied Dreams," "When a Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers," and several other of Crane's masterful short stories. Robert Tine is the author of six novels, including "State of Grace and Black Market." He has written for a variety of periodicals and magazines--from the "New York Times" to "Newsweek."