Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American writer, a Methodist minister's son from New Jersey, who dropped out of college, lived in New York's Bowery and published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, at his own expense in 1893. The Red Badge of Courage, written before he had seen a battle, made him famous in 1895, and he spent the rest of his short life as a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba, surviving a shipwreck off Florida that became The Open Boat. He died of tuberculosis in a German sanatorium at twenty-eight, leaving two volumes of free verse and some of the finest American short stories.