The Open Boat and Other Stories [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION He was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was shaggy and unkempt. His gray clothes were much the worse for wear and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp printer come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one who presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker man. So runs Willa Gather's description of Stephen Crane as she first encountered him in the offices of the Nebraska State Journal. Then twenty-three, Crane had achieved minor fame from the publication of The Red Badge of Courage the year before. He made a strange picture of the up-and-coming young author (at least for the world of 1895). He looked like a rebel and he was, Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871 the fourteenth and last child of the Reverend Jonathan Crane, Methodist minister, and Mary Helen (Peck) Crane. Stephen's father was a quiet. } \ I ( .1 ¦ I i. j