Southern Bookman

William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" presaged today's cultural wars

Friday marks the 189th anniversary of the start of Nat Turner's rebellion, a four-day slave insurrection in 1831 that killed 60 white people in rural Southampton County, Va.

White novelist and Virginia native William Styron in 1967 published "The Confessions of Nat Turner," narrated by Turner, the revolt's leader.

Styron imagined much of Turner's character and the bloody events of the uprising, having little historical documentation beyond Turner's own confession in 1831 to prosecuting attorney Thomas Ruffin Gray, published a few years later as "The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va."

While Styron's book won the Pulitzer Prize and initially received acclaim from predominantly white critics, black intellectuals protested his depiction of Turner, the blacks who joined the rebellion and white slave owners. They claimed that Turner was a heroic black figure and that Styron reduced him to a cultural stereotype. Styron indignantly responded that Turner was virtually unknown, even among the black community, and that as a novelist he had the right to re-imagine historical events.

The black anger culminated in the 1968 book "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond." In Styron's "This Quiet Dust," a 1982   collection of his non-fiction writing, the author said that his book "was the first novel in the long annals of American publishing to evoke such an immediate, entirely hostile attack."

Such attacks have become more frequent in recent years, with authors accused of cultural expropriation if they imagine characters of a different race, gender or sexual orientation. Styron's daughter, Alexandra, in a recent Atlantic essay compared the outrage over her father's book with that engendered recently by the publication of Jeanine Cummins' "American Dirt." 

In the essay, Alexandra Styron wondered if her father's book would even be published in today's cultural climate. She concluded that it would be, if written by a major author such as her father. But a little-known writer likely would be censored.

She points out that William Styron's close friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write the book and assume the voice of Nat Turner. Ralph Ellison also praised the book, as did black historian John Hope Franklin in a review in the Chicago Tribune, the only one written by a black writer in the thousands of newspapers that then existed.

Historian Eugene D. Genovese's defense of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" in The New York Review of Books ended the attacks on "The Confessions of Nat Turner."  The Marxist historian was known for his examination of slave life, "Roll Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made."

It must be admitted that the defense of Styron in a review revered among his intellectual circle looks like a closing of the ranks. While leftist, The New York Review was an organ of mostly white New York intellectuals who despite their liberal views on race closed their doors to many black writers.

Alexandra Styron admits her father' lack of humility in battling his critics. He felt the need to justify "The Confessions of Nat Turner" 15 years later in "This Quiet Dust." The title article, first published in Harper's magazine in 1965, tells about his visiting Southampton County in an effort to retrace Nat Turner's path. He republished the essay to counter black claims that he did insufficient historical research for the book.

The essay, which captures Southern whites' condescension toward blacks, shows Styron at his best.

After fruitless attempts to find surviving signs of the insurrection, Styron comes upon the ruins of the house he believes to be that of Margaret Whitehead, the only white directly killed by Turner. One of the black intellectuals' most heated criticisms of Styron was his imagined flirtation between Whitehead and Turner. 

In the novel, Turner reluctantly murders her at the instigation of another slave seeking to take over leadership of the revolt. Another violent black stereotype, the critics said.

Styron went on to write "Sophie's Choice." Although Harold Bloom accused Styron of antisemitism, the book escaped the controversy stirred by Nat Turner and gained widespread popularity, one of the last "literary" American novels that united the country's readership.

Supported by Henry Louis Gates and Spike Lee, and buoyed by Styron's enduring posthumous reputation, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" retains a strong readership, although it's generally avoided on high school and college curricula.

No doubt overly sensitive college students would object to its inclusion on class reading lists. Soon, no books will be acceptable, and English classes will be extinct.

"The Confessions of Nat Turner" drew the first shots in a cultural war that fully rages today.

 

Pete Hamill's death brings sorrow for lost era of American literature

Pete Hamill, who died this week at age 85, was the last lion of a great age of American literature.

Hamill and other writers who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s were known for their "new journalism," in which novelistic techniques were employed in the reporting of actual events. But they also wrote novels, short stories and essays, following Gore Vidal's dictum that writing is writing, and a good writer should be proficient in every genre.

The era brought abuses; New Journalism stars were accused of inventing scenes and dialogue in presenting situations believed to be factual. But, overall, the era raised journalism to a high literary level, and energized the novel.

Hamill, and his sometimes competitor, sometimes colleague Jimmy Breslin, raised the literary quality of New York newspapers, especially the now struggling tabloids The New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton, and the Daily News. Before owned by Rupert Murdoch, who ousted Hamill as editor, the Post was a literary liberal daily, owned by Dorothy Schiff. 

Before writing for New York tabloids, Breslin was a star of the old broadsheet Herald-Tribune, which despite its star writers succumbed to the New York City newspaper strike of the 1960s. That strike killed off a number of New York papers. For years a bastion of liberal Republicanism, the Herald-Tribune gave beneficial competition to The New York Times.

I was amazed at reading in Hamill's obituaries that he published short stories in The New York Post and Daily News, like Isaac Bashevis Singer contributing Yiddish stories to the Jewish Forward.

While the New York Times sometimes publishes fiction, it's hard to imagine a writer today finding a steady outlet for short stories in a newspaper.

Along with Hamill, like Breslin best known for his newspaper columns, the era gave us New Journalism pioneer and Herald Tribune stalwart Thomas Wolfe, novelist and ground-breaking journalist Norman Mailer, cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, jazz critic and free speech champion Nat Hentoff, political journalism chronicler Timothy Crouse, columnist Murray Kempton and the satirical gonzo malcontent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Along with courageous reporting on the Vietnam War, racial discrimination, economic inequities and American and international politics, a dazzling group of rock critics emerged: The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs of Creem and Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason who shifted from jazz to rock, especially covering the San Francisco psychedelic scene.

Along with Thompson and Crouse, Rolling Stone developed writers like Joe Eszterhas, Cameron Crowe and P.J. O'Rourke, who evolved into a compelling conservative/libertarian critic.

The scene was hetero-male-dominated, but Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Mary McGrory, Eve Babitz, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Jill Johnston and others broke through the boys' club.

For those of us longing for literary glory in stifling Southern towns, magazines and newspapers from New York City were like oxygen tanks sent to those drowning beneath the sea.

Harold Hayes' Esquire, Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, Willie Morris' Harper's, Clay Felker's New York magazine, Dan Wolf's Village Voice, I.F. Stone's Weekly and George Plimpton's Paris Review allowed us to claim membership in a hip, urban community.

While my conservative alma mater LSU swung to frat parties on football weekends and a general complacency, it offered outlets for European films, avant-garde music and literature beyond the bounds of our English course curricula. (My French teacher, a nice Southern lady, was shocked when I asked about Rimbaud.)

Vietnam Moratorium Day brought out a surprisingly large crowd, filling the Parade Grounds where compulsory ROTC cadets drilled in years past. Withstanding the taunts of flat-topped frat boys, many held small wooden crosses in support of anti-war speakers.

Even after the slaying of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon, those writers gave us hope for a better America. My sadness at Hamill's death is intensified by the knowledge that those dreams crashed. But even in these dark days, the heroic life of Hamill inspires us to keep the flame alive.

 

 

Former Deadspin writers say "hey kids, let's form a web site." It's called Defector.

Estranged former Deadspin writers have formed a new online venture called Defector Media.

Defector Media will be owned by 19 out of 20 of the writers who quit Deadspin in November in a dispute with G/O Media, the web site's new owner. Each writer will own 5 percent of Defector Media, with rights to their own work, acccording to media reports.

Unlike Deadspin, a hallmark of the old free Internet, Defector will operate under a subscription model, rather than depending on ads. A subscription will cost $8 a month, with an annual discount.

In contrast to the Athletic, also a subscription model, Defector hasn't received any outside funding from venture capitalists. In a new take on the collective format, the writers are the sole investors. For more on the new site, here is a Slate interview with writer Maitreyi Anantharaman,

Fans of edgy writers like Drew Magary, Diane Moskowitz, David Roth and Ray Ratto have already given the site 7,000 subscriptions. Returning to the mix that ran the writers afoul of C/O Media, Defector will cover pop culture and politics as well as sports. C/O demanded that the then Deadspin writers focus on sports, which led to the mass resignations.

While looking at TV, films and social media, Defector will be sports-oriented, which will put it in competition with Athletic, as well as the still existent but struggling Deadspin, ESPN, Bleacher Report, MLB.com and the wounded former giant Sports Illustrated. Local newspaper that fought off the Athletic's staff raids will also have to keep an eye on the new site's reporting on local teams.

Led by Editor-in-Chief Tom Ley and business leader Jasper Wang, a Bain and Co. alum, Defector will begin podcasts next month, with the web site going online in September.

Defector represents another move away from the ad-based online model, which gave free access to viewers. Now, with a few holdouts like the New York Review of Books, Salon and others, most media companies have a paid subscription model, most successfully The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. A few local newspapers are also trying to generate online subscriptions.

The now dominant subscription model will bring greater competition and fragmentation. How much can consumers afford with the increasing number of TV streaming channels and media sites charging for articles?

Defector looks like a variation on the Substack model of authors receiving direct pay for their work. Such collectives have been tried before; here in Atlanta, "Like the Dew" was an online pioneer of the model. As local newspapers collapse, similar collectives have popped up around the country. Some are trying to survive as nonprofits.

Readers and viewers have a greater variety of choices than in the old days of one dominant local newspaper, three newsweeklies and three networks. Whether this results in a better informed public remains in question.

 

Farewell, Christopher Dickey

Christopher Dickey's distinguished career as a foreign correspondent and author represented a triumph over his father, poet James Dickey.

Dickey, who died unexpectedly July 16 in Paris of heart failure at age 68, moved far beyond the shadow of his father, a major American poet who gained widespread popularity with his novel "Deliverance," turned into a landmark movie of Hollywood's fabled era of the 1970s.

The Paris bureau chief for the Daily Beast when he died, Christopher Dickey was known as a consummate reporter, writer, editor and mentor for young journalists.

Starting out reporting for The Washington Post in Mexico and Central America, Dickey advanced to the Post-owned news magazine Newsweek, covering Europe, Latin America and the Mideast. He possessed the guile to report on the inner workings of foreign governments, and the moxie to report on wars.

When moribund Newsweek was taken over by the Daily Beast, he found new success in online journalism, and as a commentator for NBC.

His "Summer of Deliverance" is one of the classic memoirs of growing up with a destructive literary father. Born in Nashville, Chris Dickey moved with his father to his native Atlanta and other Southern cities, and spent time in Europe.

Like another writer with Atlanta roots, Pat Conroy, Chris Dickey was damaged by his father, barely speaking to him for years. Chris Dickey blamed his bombastic alcoholic father for the death of his mother, also a serious alcoholic.

Like Conroy, Christopher Dickey reconciled with his father, who died in 1997. "Summer of Deliverance" is a story of forgiveness and redemption.

In TV reports, Dickey displayed the classic image of the worldly foreign correspondent, with the Paris skyline as his backdrop. He spoke with precise pronunciation, as if raised in posh British schools.

He separated himself from his domineering father. "Summer of Deliverance" details the pain his father caused him, and the gift he bestowed upon him: a passion for experience and language.

 

Farewell, Paul Fusco

Photos of mourners watching Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train pass by from New York City to the nation's capital on June 8, 1968 are among the most famous images of the 1960s.

But most of Paul Fusco's photographs from that sad summer day lay hidden for 30 years in the Library of Congress.

Fusco, who died July 15 at age 89 in California, was a Look magazine photographer on the funeral train, assigned to cover the burial of the assassinated senator and presidential candidate at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia.

After Kennedy's funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, his coffin was placed on the last car of a funeral train and left Penn Station for Arlington, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

When Fusco wasn't allowed inside the car where Kennedy's body lay, he turned his Leica to the thousands of mourners who turned out to watch the train on its 225-mile trip. He took around 1,800 photos of the mourners holding hand-made signs with messages like "So long, Bobby."

Look, the biweekly picture magazine that competed with Life, didn't come out until a couple of weeks after the funeral, so it used  only two of Fusco's shots, printed inside the magazine in black and white. The photos didn't receive wide currency until Robert Kennedy's nephew, John F. Kennedy Jr., printed a number of them in a special edition of his George magazine commemorating the 30th anniversary of RFK's assassination.

Books containing the photos came out in 2000 and 2008. A large selection of the photographs were displayed in 2018 at an exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Along with the Kennedy funeral photos, Fusco is known for chronicling the Cesar Chavez grape strike in 1966, and photos of California's counterculture, including a famous psychedelic shot of Janis Joplin.

He left Look when the magazine folded in 1971, quickly followed by Life, and joined the photographers' collective Magnum. Later in his career, Fusco took arresting photos of the AIDS outbreak, Chernobyl victims in Belarus, and survivors of soldiers killed in the Iraq war. Much of his work gave recognition to disadvantaged communities.

While escaping the Vietnam War, Fusco served as an Army photographer in Korea, receiving a bronze medal.

Fusco's RFK photos mark a turning point in American history, when Kennedy's progressive vision that galvanized millions died with him.

The photographer remembered his amazement at the number of people lining the railroad tracks when the train left the Hudson River tunnel and entered New Jersey.

Kennedy's aides, also surprised at the huge outpouring of grief, propped Kennedy's coffin on chairs so that it could be glimpsed as it passed by. Slowed to a crawl, the train made the usual four-hour journey in eight hours.

The crowd not only mourned the young senator and brother of slain President John F. Kennedy. They also mourned America.

 

 

Conservative writer Bari Weiss tells New York Times farewell

Bari Weiss' resignation from The New York Times has ignited the latest flashpoint in today's cultural wars.

Weiss' melodramatic goodbye letter, posted on her web site Tuesday, received front-cover treatment in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, the scrappy tabloid younger brother of The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. The Times played the story on the bottom of its second Business page.

A well-known staunch supporter of Israel, Weiss claimed she was bullied by Times staffers because of her conservative - she says moderate - views. In the letter to Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, she accused the Times management of discouraging diverse viewpoints.

It's odd that such a champion of Israel would feel shunned at The Times, for years unyielding in its backing of Israel, especially columnists like William Safire. The Jewish Sulzberger family was notorious for using initials to cover up Jewish bylines, and was late in reporting the Holocaust. But it rarely wavered in its editorial support of Israel.

Although Weiss' flamboyant resignation looks contrived, I have some sympathy for her in recalling my grueling unsuccessful tryout for the Times years ago. I also felt afflicted by a hostile atmosphere.

The New York Daily News was much more welcoming when I had a tryout there, and the tab offered me a job, one of my many roads not taken from my long years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Despite that ray of empathy, I'm suspicious of Weiss' motives, especially when New York magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan resigned the same day, hinting at a new venture with Weiss. Writers like Weiss call sensitive college students "snowflakes." What is she, an icicle?

As her leaving made its big stir, I was left wondering what she ever wrote for the Times, outside of Twitter tweets such as one that supported The Times' publication of Sen. Tom Cotton's op-ed article. The piece advocating the call-out of troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests sparked a Times staff protest that led to the exit of Op-Ed Editor James Bennet. Unless I missed it, Weiss hasn't published a Times opinion piece in months.

Suspiciously, Weiss accused Times staffers of accosting her with tweets, in violation of Times policy, when her favored venue seems to be Twitter. Guess long sentences became too tough with all the hate she felt at the Times.

Weiss was listed as a Times editor; perhaps she was the only one who could stomach editing conservative columnists Bret Stephens or David Brooks. She would probably shudder at Paul Krugman and Charles M. Blow. By the way, Blow is the paper's only black columnist.

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin used the Weiss resignation for another one of his wild blasts at the Times, which he claims has succumbed to radical leftist views throughout its news columns. While the Times allows more personal opinion in news stories than in the old days, Goodwin's accusations are far-fetched.

Goodman even says the Times is no longer a newspaper. Who is he, George S. Kaufman?

While indulging in his usual hyperbole, Goodwin did write an excellent column the day before exposing the pro-Confederate stance of legendary Times owner Adolph Ochs' mother, Bertha Levy Ochs.

Adolph Ochs was revered for making The New York Times the nation's journalistic paragon, but he also owned the Chattanooga Times, which Goodwin demonstrates supported segregation and Southern white supremacy. The Sulzbergers are Ochs' descendants.

By the way, I'm fond of Goodwin despite his extreme conservative views. An editor at the Daily News during my tryout there, he was much warmer than any of the Times bureaucrats I encountered, and even offered me the job. Unfortunately, at the salary offered,  I would have had to commute from Trenton.

As for Weiss, I'm sure she'll flourish outside of the Times hothouse. 

 

 

 

 

Book discoveries at home during Covid-19

I'll even try to read "Howard's End."

The other day, I glimpsed a paperback of E.M. Foster's novel peeking out from my bedroom bookshelf. The book's been resting there for years unread.

Never mind that Foster's mantra "only connect" looks out-of-place in this era of social distancing. I've read through most of the other books that have been nestling dormant in my home library, so I've come to my end, as well as Howard's.

During the coronavirus pandemic, I've acquired just one new book, Nelson Algren's appreciation of Chicago, "City on the Make." Fearful of catching Covid-19 from some unmasked sneezing bibliophile, I've given up my longtime habit of going to bookstores.

My well-worn Nook e-reader stopped downloading new books and magazines, and I couldn't figure out how to change the software.

Yes, I could buy books online, but I'm boycotting Amazon, now running those absurd TV commercials about what an enlightened company it is. Besides, no recently published books interest me.

Even the libraries have been closed. The Sandy Springs Library that reopened only a couple of months before the pandemic is now doing curbside checkouts of books placed on hold, but the procedure seems as cumbersome as a Hartsfield-Jackson's TSA line.

So, I've been rediscovering books on my bookshelves, many of them I had never read or in which I lasted for only a chapter or two. I've tried to reread books I loved years before, but for some reason, I'm usually unable to return to once beloved narratives. Although I enjoyed Vivian Gornick's recent "Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader," I can't rekindle the literary flame.

Even before the pandemic, my bookstore habit had been reduced to the Peach Shopping Center's Barnes & Noble, the only bookstore left in Buckhead after the collapse of Atlanta's Oxford stores and the Borders chain. Atlanta's few remaining independent bookstores are too far away for frequent visits. Although Buckhead enjoys a profusion of supermarkets and pharmacy chains, it's a book desert.

The old Buckhead Borders, where I covered a book signing of George W. and Laura Bush and whiled away many hours, is now a Container Store. During Borders' expansive years, I also frequented a couple other of its stores. 

Oxford's flagship store in Peachtree Battle Shopping Center was one of my favorite all-time bookstores, along with the also vanished Maple Street Bookstore in New Orleans and Scribner's in New York City. I also searched for books in two other Oxford locations in Buckhead. Alas, the Oxford empire like Borders overextended, and fell when the book bubble burst. The country must have gotten dumber before electing the great unread Orange man.

As with canceled sports, I haven't missed going to the B&N, where I interviewed Rolling Stones pianist and Georgia preservationist Chuck Leavell and glimpsed Elton John flipping through the vinyl records. The Peach B&N had reduced its selection over the years, emphasizing puzzles, games and accessories. It did appear on an upswing before the pandemic arrived, but the nearness of a coughing patron in February sent my paranoia soaring.

I miss perusing literary journals and film and jazz magazines, but I receive several literary magazines and three daily newspapers at my home. I've been surprised to find Harper's and the Atlantic at my local Publix, although the latest Harper's hasn't shown up yet.

Even before the rise of Covid-19, I discovered on my shelves an engaging volume of Alice Adams short stories. Lately, I've enjoyed the late English professor and literary critic Robert Heilman's memoirs about his days at LSU during the Huey Long era and the heyday of the Southern Review under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

I've recently enjoyed pleasant afternoons browsing through Mike Davis's analysis of Los Angeles, "City of Quartz," and a collection of W.H. Auden's forewords and afterwords.

While I haven't yet returned to Auden's poems, I haven't slighted poetry, delving into a collection of Paul Muldoon's collected poems my daughter won as a literary prize at Princeton and favorite poems by Richard Wilbur and others.

In a pinch, Seymour Krim and Dan Wakefield gave good doses of 1950s and 1960s New York nostalgia.

Now, "Howard's End."

 

 

Times Literary Supplement gives authors' summer reading plans

In the June 26 Times Literary Supplement, well-known writers list the books they're reading this summer.

The TLS feature, matching a holiday reading survey, gives a voyeuristic thrill. The cheerful comments of authors like Hilary Mantel, Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Enright make them seem just like us.

A common motif is that because of the coronavirus, authors will be doing their summer reading at home this year rather than at exotic beaches or idyllic country retreats. Another theme is reading children's books to sons and daughters unable to go to school.

While the authors do seem like regular folks, they don't go in for the light reading associated with the lazy, sun-dazzled season. Oates, for example, is embarking upon Dostoevsky after finishing "War and Peace" and other Tolstoy tomes.

With the coronavirus out of control, Trump's daily outrages, and racial turmoil, the old idea of pleasurable summer reading looks superfluous. Yet, I more and more seek to escape the news, especially the gloom bearers of MSNBC. I agree with them of course, but the strident Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow get my a-fib a-fibbing.

Spurred by the ambitious reading of the TLS authors, I might try again to finish "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." But Gibbon would seem too much like cable news.

 

Flannery O'Connor's racism doesn't detract from her artistry

Flannery O'Connor was among the long list of venerated authors who expressed racist views.

While her racist slurs and opposition to black civil rights have long been documented, author Paul Elie in a June 22 New Yorker article accuses O'Connor's followers of seeking to evade her racism.

O'Connor's adherents have denied Elie's claims. Amy Alznauer, in a better argued article published by The Bitter Southerner,  says that O'Connor's racism has long drawn fire from critical commentators.

Elie, who included O'Connor in his survey of Catholic writers "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," asserts that O'Connor's supporters try to justify her views with the dubious argument that she was a product of her times. But he overstates her native Georgia's racial progress in the last years of her life, when the state's opposition to segregation hardened.

Elie's article coincides with the publication of Angela Alaimo O'Donnell's "Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O'Connor." Alznauer expresses outrage at Elie's cursory dismissal of O'Donnell's work.

Black authors like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison have condemned O'Connor's racism while admiring her fiction, Alznauer says.

As Elie points out, O'Connor like C.S. Lewis is one of those writers passionately followed because of her religious outlook. O'Connor's letters and essays with their spiritual reflections are as celebrated by many readers as her short stories and novels.

O'Connor's exalted position as a literary saint demands a reckoning with her racism, Elie says. He contrasts O'Connor with poet Philip Larkin, also exposed for casual racism.

"Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories," Elie says.

An artist like O'Connor needs no such protection, no matter how condemnable her views.

 

 

 

Remembering Stephen Crane

I've rediscovered Stephen Crane, one of my favorite authors during my college days.

Like Keats, Crane died young of tuberculosis. Crane, the author of the best-seller "The Red Badge of Courage," was 28. 

Crane was a product of the rough-and-tumble New York newspaper and magazine world of the 1890s. "The Red Badge of Courage," lauded for its realistic depiction of combat although Crane had never gone to war, didn't make him financially secure.

The novella gives an impressionistic account of a young soldier's experience of battle. Isolated from his unit, the soldier wanders through a hellish landscape in which natural beauty contrasts with the horror of death. The never named battle has similarities to Chancellorsville.

In the last chapter of his well-traveled career,  Crane was a correspondent covering the Spanish-American War, writing an account of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Crane had first met Roosevelt, then New York City's police commissioner, when testifying in favor of a woman accused of prostitution.

Constantly writing for money, Crane during his life made reporting trips to the untamed western United States, Mexico and Greece, where he covered the Greco-Turkish War. Beginning with "Maggie, A Girl of the Streets," he kept writing fiction such as "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" and "The Blue Hotel" along with "The Red Badge of Courage."  He also wrote poetry.

Outside of "The Red Badge of Courage," his most famous and accomplished work is the non-fiction "The Open Boat," based on his surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida.

In 1896, Crane was en route from Jacksonville to Cuba on the SS Commodore when the ship sunk after striking a sandbar. Crane and three others were adrift in a boat for 36 hours before deciding to swim for land in turbulent waves. Battling the surf, Crane and two others made it to Daytona Beach, the other man drowning.

"The Open Boat" is a masterpiece of realistic writing, marked by the depiction of humans struggling against an uncaring nature.

Before Hemingway, Crane was the model of the dashing, adventurous American writer and war correspondent. "The Red Badge of Courage" and "The Open Boat" have never been matched.