Dumpster Story: Why I Feel So Passionate About Digital Publishing. The print industry prevented myriad authors from ever reaching readers, un'published', with their lives and work thrown away never read by anyone…

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Author & Self-Publisher. He was a compulsive writer by the age of four, like many real authors. It was well that this pivotal U.S. author should start early, because his life and career were brief and meteoric. He died at 28, far younger even than Edgar Allan Poe, but Crane also left a lasting name in U.S. literature. He is popularly remembered for The Red Badge of Courage, a novel about the U.S. Civil War. Literati remember him as an innovative author in the schools of Impressionism and Naturalism or Realism. He self-published his first novel at age 23, and made a global reputation for himself in the last few years of his meteoric life, amid storms of predictable controversy from the gate keepers of sentimentalism, maudlin heroics, and mediocre prose, not to mention the usual stern, vapor-brained upholders of public order. The young Stephen Crane would die of tuberculosis in 1900, at age 28, in a German sanatorium. In his last three years of life, the struggling but meteoric young crusader and literary innovator would earn global fame (and a predictable amount of moral and artistic opprobrium) for his considerable and high-quality output. Among his best known works are Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), The Red Badge of Courage (1895), and The Open Boat (1897).

Stephen Crane: Bio Sketch. Stephen Crane was the eighth and last surviving child of fourteen (six died in childhood). His loving but overwhelmed parents were conservative Protestants (the father a Methodist minister, the mother a clergyman's daughter). Crane could trace his lineage to the 1638 founders of New Haven Colony in Connecticut (Puritans), and had an ancestor who fought with distinction in the Revolutionary War. His father wrote of Crane that he was a sickly child and "we are very worried about him." His mother was active in the Women's Christian Temperance movement, whose more radical wing was led by women like Carrie Nation who invaded saloons with platoons of like-minded, axe-wielding crusaders. Crane spoke of his mother as being more intelligent and tolerant than her fellow temperamentalists. The more remarkable wing of this movement created the U.S. movement to install public water fountains, often surmounted by statues of the Greek Hebe (Roman Iuventas, Youth). The humor and irony were evident: these garden fonts were 'Fountains of Youth' dedicated to abstinence from alcohol. His loving and relatively tolerant parents offered their physically frail but mentally robust child an ideal platform for the great writer he was to become. In school, he excelled at athletics, especially the U.S. national sport of baseball, but was a student of mixed energies, indifferent in some areas, who never finished college. He had a natural flair in literature and history studies, but was less interested in mathematics and the sciences. The precocious 'Stevie' bore some of the staunch moralist genes of his forebears, and a good deal of intellectual courage as well, which drove him to become a crusading journalist. He began his writing career in newspapers and journals, and published small pieces. A heavy smoker with a hacking cough and thin physique, he seems to have tended toward strongly sexed and unconventional women. His first major liaison was with a married woman, who nearly eloped with him, but the relationship foundered on the shoals of his poverty and poor prospects. He became notorious due to an incident, while he was interviewing several prostitutes for the type of story that would become his Maggie. He and the prostitutes were arrested by a plain-clothes detective. During an ensuing lawsuit, the detective physically assaulted the woman bringing suit. Coming to her defense, the valiant Crane saw his reputation destroyed in a staunchly Victorian U.S. society. The detective got off and the woman lost her case. The story made national news in the Yellow Press, and earned Crane both notoriety and disapproval that affected his literary career. Crane's longer term relationship was with a former bordello madam, Cora Taylor. Taylor was a Bohemian type from a wealthy family and 'good breeding,' who ran a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida when she and Crane met. Crane had a long-term fascination not just with bawdy houses, but with poverty and flop houses, and most importantly with the people who lived in them. In that narrow sense, he reminds a bit of Charles Dickens in London, half a century earlier, who was the best-known investigative journalist of his day.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Crane's first novel remains an innovative classic of Naturalism or Realism. This controversial artistic movement put a target on the U.S. author's back, because the theory was to replace sentimental, false images of ghettos and poverty with unvarnished, realistic grit that told the true story. Such controversial, crusading honesty was barely possible for U.S. society to swallow or to permit. Charles Dickens' personal experience of childhood destitution and workhouses, as well as his probes into London's infamous rookeries in which the poor lived in violent, unimaginable conditions, made Dickens reviled by the British establishment a half century earlier, but Dickens' melancholy leads (e.g., David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, stemming from his own miserable childhood in a boot-blacking factory) were often surrounded by caricatures swirling in absurd humor, typified even in their names (e.g., Fagin, Uriah Heep). Dickens' realistic, at root horrifying tales thus came bundled in a candywrapper of dark comedy, and Dickens stretched the limits of sentimentality to achieve popular acceptance (e.g., The Old Curiosity Shop, 1841). Stephen Crane's investigations into the underbelly of the late 19th-Century United States had no such buffering sugar coating. The bitter pill was for the public to swallow, and the establishment to allow; neither happened any too quickly. Crane's life mirrored the unalloyed dip into sordid pools that his writing initially ladled out. At the tender age of 22, this led to Crane's first enduring literary work: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was rejected all around, and Crane paid to publish it ('self-published'). Having already tasted and not liked the bitterly galled lash of controversy, he furthermore released Maggie under the grayest of all possible bland pseudonyms: 'Johnston Smith.' His Maggie was not so much a darkly entertaining and suitably hapless victim of pernicious social evils, like Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Crane's Maggie was a 'flower blossoming in a puddle,' amid raw-knuckled and cruel daily life peppered with ghetto jargon. Maggie had perhaps more in common—than suited the established order's moralistic watchdogs and censors—with France's Marianne of the Barricades, who was exemplified in Eugene Delacroix' 1830 Liberty Leading the People.

Stephen Crane's short life involved a tension between his physical frailty and his robust lifestyle. He made studying the slums, the poor, and their personalities his major life's task. Like Teddy Roosevelt, he was a frail man who boosted his vigor through adventuresome living. Like Edgar Allan Poe, he spent several early years in a military academy (Poe, West Point; Crane, not far from West Point, at the quasi-military Claverack seminary). Crane's socially conscious reporting on slums got him banned from the sensationalist, nationalist, maudlin press of his age, and his reputation foundered even as his ill-repute was spread by detractors. In that sense, he was not dissimilar from Poe, whose dark and scary tales were the bane of puritans, and whose posthumous reputation was blackened by a jealous and untalented Salieri (see earlier PIN article on Poe). Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was born during Stephen Crane's early adulthood, when he had lived in poverty and tasted the dangerous and heady mix of brutality and beauty in the slums of U.S. cities first-hand. By 1893, at age 22, he tried his novel about a 'flower blossoming in a mud puddle' among the usual establishment publishers, and did not find a buyer. The U.S. was wrapped up in a nationalist, pietarian frenzy whipped up by the Yellow Press. That very year, U.S. interests had overthrown the legitimate monarchy of an independent nation, Hawai'i, and were moving toward annexing that country as a U.S. territory. Within six years, in 1898, the U.S. would move into war with Spain, in which the U.S. conquered most of the Spanish Empire. President Teddy Roosevelt would send the Great White Fleet on a U.S. saber-rattling tour around the world to show that the former British colonies were on the verge of becoming a world power. After their victory in the U.S. Civil War (1861-65), largely Northern U.S. industrialists launched into the Gilded Age of excess and fabulous fortunes envied by the titled but impoverished gentry of Britain. The labor movement was suspect, and condemned in the Yellow Press. In that atmosphere, writers like Stephen Crane and Upton Sinclair became the targets of a relentless campaign to besmirch the growing labor movement. Crane's novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was self-published, and a commercial failure that further bankrupted the 23 year old author. He wrote in a sometimes difficult to read street slang that mirrored the real language of his vibrant subjects. In many ways, Maggie was a pivotal exemplar of that Victorian trope, the Fallen Angel. The Fallen Angel, a virtuous and pure Victorian woman brought low by the evil of the world, and especially men, but also women, was the leading icon of the age. She was, in some ways, a defanged goddess dating to Marianne of the barricades, a powerful Athena-like deity of revolution-prone France from 1791 through 1830 (painting: Liberty Leading The People, by Eugene Delacroix). The Fallen Angel was a helpless, child-deity of both the Industrial Revolution and the pietarian British Empire, with its Anglican state religion. As Maggie, the clawless and flawless goddess of Purity threatened to once again become a social force (like Delacroix's Liberty) and therefore had to be suppressed by the industrial establishment of the Gilded Age, of U.S. Pacific and Caribbean conquests, and of matching European powers who were solidly headed for the cataclysm of World War I (1914-1918). The book did not sell. Young Crane, age 23, was broke and depressed after spending the very tidy sum of $869 to self-publish 1,100 copies. When the book did not sell, he gave many of its copies out for free to anyone who promised to read them. This sounds depressingly familiar to modern self-publishers, especially in the print on demand (POD) evolutionary dead end. The U.S. readership of 1893 was not ready for Maggie, with its difficult dialog and risqué themes, as opposed to the war propaganda, faux patriotism, and sectarian shallowness being pounded daily in the Yellow Press. There was also an overhang of sectarian and class bigotry, and an ominous air of moral disapproval from the authorities. If the modern shoe fits, we should wear it—except today's publishers are not put off by forbidden topics as much as they compete to promulgate formerly forbidden themes (and the effect is the same, of gate keepers selecting their cards while trashing potential Stephen Cranes and Beatrix Potters left and right). But Maggie, like her author, would not be forgotten.

The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Two years of research and writing later, Crane's immortal Civil War novel appeared. In it, Stephen Crane continued to chart new territory. Technically, it is an impressionist work in the sense that he used stream of consciousness to realistically portray the protagonist's inner feelings. The protagonist feels fear, even fights cowardice, and longs for a 'red badge' (wound) to demonstrate his courage in a real way—not only to the world, but to himself. Just as Crane avoided portraying Maggie as a heroic, sentimental heroine of the streets, so his protagonist Henry Fleming is a realistic individual rather than the typical larger than life warrior modeled on Classical and Teutonic mythologies. Crane's hero is an anti-hero, a coward who flees in battle, and must redeem himself by becoming the next battle's standard-bearer. Crane is thought to have interviewed dozens of real-life veterans of the Civil War, just as he did hands-on and feet-on groundwork for Maggie's story. There is a special lesson for neophyte writers here. We are familiar with 'write what you know.' Crane got to intimately know the often sordid and harsh reality of the streets, including his choice of women. Because Crane lived between wars, he did the next best thing, and interviewed those who had really lived the battles, the deaths, the maimings, and the terror. He did not attempt to color or sanitize their experiences to shape them into maudlin schoolmasterish 'moral lessons' (like those taught by the huffing school teacher Kantorek in the film All Is Quiet on the Western Front (1930), whom the protagonist Paul Bäumer vilifies when returning home on leave. (The hero's role as Paul Bäumer was played by the actor Lew Ayres, 1908-1996, a pacifist who served with distinction as a U.S. Army medic in World War II, and went on to star in such major roles as the Governor of Hawai'i in the original Hawai'i 5-0 and as Dr. Kildare in the eponymous TV series.) After some rejections and missteps, a heavily edited serial version of The Red Badge of Courage appeared in syndication in a number of newspapers in 1895. Even in its butchered form, the book caused a stir and made a name for Stephen Crane, who by then had a little over four years left to live. A question, of course, is what he might have accomplished had he not died at age 28.

The Open Boat (1897). Among his shorter works, The Open Boat is the most iconic and most often anthologized. It is based on a true story of struggle, heroism, and survival amid nature's fatal furies. It has been described as a naturalistic horror story among other things. Crane may not have lived the Civil War of his red badge novel, but he lived The Open Boat. He barely survived, while watching a fellow survivor drown during the ordeal. The open boat is a natural metaphor for many philosophical issues, including the individual's survival in a hostile universe—be it the forces and terrors of nature, or the farces and horrors of mankind.

Global Perspectives. As a struggling freelance writer, Crane struggled to bring unsentimental, un-Romanticist, un-Victorian true stories to the public consciousness. This made him one of the nation's premier Naturalist or Realist writers. He was a man ahead of his time. As an early adapter of stream-of-consciousness as a literary technique, he mirrored the growing Modern Art and general Impressionist movement. In fact, one of the powerful motifs in Crane's work is the repeated and effective use of strong and chromatic colors. This may well signal his strong and technically adept interest in the growing, avant-garde modernist movements emanating from France at the time. If the U.S. was a religious and political colony of the British Empire, and a Commonwealth nation in all but name, then France was the capital of an artistic empire. Paris at Fin de Siecle epitomized a counter-spirit of the Grand Tour, in being the capital of avant-garde music, painting, and literature. Crane was at the forefront of an innovative artistic spirit so fragile in far-away 'America' (a nation that does not exist in reality, but is the shining Utopia of militant propagandists throughout U.S. history). The U.S., whose Transcendentalist revolution in the 1830s had galvanized the world, and had drawn the likes of Alexis de Toqueville to write about U.S. democracy, had become industrialized and homogenized in that same 1830s revolution. The steamroller that outgunned and outmanned the secessionist South easily championed the cause of Gilded Age industrialists over the reformers and democratic Constitutionalists of labor. The press had become a national, mass produced instrument in support of not only a geographical Manifest Destiny, but a brooding, shadowless Giorgio de Chirico-like antitopia of laissez-faire capitalism that blended well with the dominant native Puritanism (and still works very effectively in the early 21st Century). The Bohemian Jewish author Franz Kafka (1883-1924) immortalized a similar spirit of industrial, faceless repression, specifically in the Austro-Hungarian milieu, but foreseeing the proletarian terrors of Fascism and Soviet Communism on a more universal scale.

Naturalism or Realism was a broad artistic movement that sought to take the arts beyond the pietarian establishment's politicized, institutionalized, industrialized, and authorized mediocrities. In his tale of the streets, he painted an unvarnished and unsentimental image of the slums that defied what the establishment permitted. The sanitized arts mandate was practiced, for example, by communities across the U.S. that banned nudity or suggestiveness in sculpture, and put paper legs on Thanksgiving turkeys' roasted ankles. Amid an upsurge of cyclical religious revivalism, such repression was convenient to Gilded Age industrial dukes like Astor and Vanderbilt, and their rupertose heralds like William Randolph Hearst as they mustered new wars and conquests (Hawai'i in 1893, Spanish Empire in 1898). In the 'mother country,' Britain, youthful men and women of the ruling class, during the British Empire, were socially compelled to make a horrified and cautious, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage—commonly known as the Grand Tour—through Catholic France and Italy. These nations were officially seen as inferior and degenerate in their past glories, while remaining unfortunate museums of great, seminal art dating to the Roman and Medieval past. These lost glories must be selectively sampled in light of British Imperial and Anglican religious superiorities. This attitude was dutifully mirrored by the neo-colonial Henry James in works like Daisy Miller. The spirit survives in the 21st Century U.S., where the popular 'tea-bagger' underbelly of ignorance includes in its antipantheon the Frenchman as 'queers' and 'cowards.' In a similar context, we must not forget to mention 'liberalism' and 'humanism' as bêtes-noires of the goose-stepping barrel-bottom of society, in Crane's day and ours. Not peculiar to any age or nation, this relentless march to tyranny is part of the Human Condition, with its cycle of tragedies. Compare with Hitler's and Stalin's smear campaigns against other ephemeral targets (Jews, homosexuals, etc.) designed to drum up fanatical nationalism for a hobnailed Rockettes dance on the road to ruin. Financial support for the world's Hitlers is to be found in the banking and investment establishment, which eagerly plays the strong horse every time, seen before the starting gate. For a good sense of the Grand Tour, we read E. M. Forster's Humanistic 1908 novel criticizing repressive Edwardian society, A Room With A View. In Room, Forster's characters take the Grand Tour a notch further and portrays the Italians as 'free' and 'sexually liberated,' versus their stuffy imperial opposites from the rainy and gloomy isles. As cultural slaves to the 'Mother Country,' as many in the U.S. called England, Americans (e.g., Edward Hopper) dutifully made their own Grand Tour to the art capital of the world in Paris. Crane never made it past Cuba, but his signal Realist (or Naturalist) short story The Open Boat became a universal classic. This was based on a true story of his shipwreck off Florida in 1897. He was on his way to Cuba to a job as a news correspondent in the runup to the Spanish-American War of 1898, when his steamer sank and he was adrift in an open boat for about thirty hours. One of the men on the lifeboat died as the small craft overturned in heavy surf off Ponce de Leon Light, south of Daytona Beach, Florida. H.G. Wells praised The Open Boat as Crane's finest work. In his final few years, Crane managed to attract worldwide attention. He received disparagement from some authors, like Ambrose Bierce, but greater praise from the likes of H. G. Wells and Joseph Conrad. One wonders if Crane would have engaged somehow in the antics of Teddy Roosevelt and other attention-grabbers, as in the charge up San Juan Hill. One wonders what Crane would have made of his first real opportunity to see the nitty-gritty of battle for himself. We can be sure the world would have received at least one more classic novel. Like so many lost Iliads and Odysseys, it just wasn't meant to be.