Riassunto esame Letteratura Angloamericana 2, professor Martinez, libro consigliato "Norton Anthology"

STEPHEN CRANE

1871­1900

Stephen Crane was born November 1, 1871, and died on June 5, 1900. By the age of twenty­eight he had

published enough material to fill a dozen volumes of a collected edition and had lived a legendary life that

has grown in interest to scholars and readers the more the facts have come to light. His family settled in

America in the mid­seventeenth century. He was the son of a Methodist minister and a social reform­minded

mother; but he systematically rejected religious and social traditions, identified with the urban poor, and lived

with the mistress of one “of the better houses of ill­fame” in Jacksonville, Florida. Although temperamentally

gentle, Crane was attracted to—even obsessed by—war and other forms of physical and psychic violence. He

frequently lived the down­and­out life of a penniless artist; he was also ambitious and something of a snob;

he was a poet and an impressionist; a journalist, a social critic, and a realist. In Crane, the contradictions and

tensions present in many writers seem to be intensified.

New York City was the inevitable destination for a young man with literary ambitions and a desire to

experience the fullness of life. A few jobs with, New York newspapers proved abortive, and between 1891

and 1893 Crane shuttled between the seedy New York apartments of his artist friends and his brother

Edmund’s house in nearby Lake View, New Jersey. In these years of extreme privation, Crane developed his

powers as an observer of psychological and social reality. Encouraged by Hamlin Garland, whom he had

heard lecture in 1891, Crane began his first book while at Syracuse. After it had been rejected by several New

York editors, he published the work—Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) ­ at his own

expense in 1893. Although Garland admired this short novel and the powerful literary arbiter W. D. Howells

promoted both Crane and Maggie (and continued to think it his best work), the book did not sell even when,

in ­revised form, it was published in 1896 by the respected publishing house of D. Appleton and Company.

Maggie told, in a highly stylized way, the story of a young girl born in the slums of New York who during her

short life is driven to prostitution and suicide. As one of the first reviewers of the 1893 edition observed: "the

evident object of the writer is to show the tremendous influence of the environment On the human character

and destiny." It remains Crane s fullest treatment of how the have­littles in the burgeoning Cities of America

lived in the 1880s and 1890s.

Crane turned next to the Civil War as a subject for The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Oddly, since the novel

has assumed a kind of classic status, he later described the book as a pot­boiler. The narrative, which depicts

the (partial) education of Henry Fleming in the context of battle, is as old as Homer’s Odyssey and is a

dominant story type in American literature from Benjamin Franklin through Melville, Hemingway, Malcolm

X, and Saul Bellow. Crane was not so much working within or against this tradition as he was departing

sharply from it. That is, Crane is distinctively modern in conceiving personal identity as complex and

ambiguous and in obliging his readers to judge for themselves the adequacy of Henry’s responses to his

experiences.

When Red Badge was first published in newspapers around the country starting in December 1894, Crane’s

fortunes began to improve. The same syndicate (an agency that buys and then sells stories to newspapers and

magazines for simultaneous publication) that took Red Badge hired him early in 1895 as a roving reporter in

the American West and Mexico, experiences that would give him the material for several of his finest tales —

“The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky’’ and “The Blue Hotel” among them. Also, early in 1895, D. Appleton and

Company agreed to issue Red Badge in book form. In the spring of that year, The Black Riders and Other

Lines, his first volume of poetry, was published in Boston by Copeland and Day. Predictably, Garland and

Howells responded favorably to Crane’s spare, original, unflinchingly honest poetry, but it was too

experimental in form and too unconventional in its dark philosophic outlook to win wide acceptance: When

Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War appeared in the fall, however, it won Crane

international acclaim at the age of twenty­four.

Crane’s poetry, journalism, and fiction clearly demonstrated his religious, social and literary rebelliousness;

his alienated, unconventional stance also led him to direct action. After challenging the New York police

force on behalf of a prostitute who claimed harassment at its hands, Crane left the city in the winter of 1896

—97 to cover the insurrection against Spain in Cuba. On his way to Cuba he met Cora Howorth Taylor, the

proprietor of a bordello, the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville, Florida, with whom he lived for the last three

years. of his life. On January 2, 1897, Crane's ship The Commodore sank off the coast of Florida. His report

of this harrowing adventure was published a few days later in the New York Press. He promptly Converted

this event into one of the best­known and most widely reprinted American stories, “The Open Boat.” This

story, like Red Badge, reveals Crane's characteristic subject matter—the physical, emotional, and intellectual

responses of people under extreme pressure, the dominant themes of nature's indifference to humanity's fate,

and the consequent need for compassionate collective action. These are not Crane's only themes, however,

and it is well to remember that in many of his stories no simple or encouraging moral can be drawn.

In “The Open Boat” and another late story, “The Blue Hotel," Crane achieved his mature style, one

characterized by irony and brevity, qualities later associated with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest

Hemingway, among others. But Crane's style cannot be contained by any of the terms typically used to

describe it ­realism, naturalism, impressionism, or expressionism. In these late stories (and before he began

to Write chiefly for money), Crane combines a poet's sensitivity to the sounds of words, the rhythms of

language, and a highly original use of metaphor with structures of action appropriate to the shifting

emotional conditions of the characters he has brought to life by carefully controlling point of view and

skillfully blending sharply observed detail and convincing dialogue. In both of these works we can observe

his tough­minded irony and his essential vision: a sympathetic but unflinching demand for courage, integrity,

grace, and generosity in the face of a universe in which human beings, to quote from “The Blue Hotel,” are

so many lice clinging “to a whirling, fire­smote, ice­locked disease­stricken, space­lost bulb."

In 1897 Crane settled in England. In the last months of his life Crane's situation became desperate; he was

suffering from tuberculosis and was seriously in debt. He wrote furiously in a doomed attempt to earn money,

but the effort only worsened his health. In 1899 he drafted thirteen stories set in the fictional town

Whilomville for Harper’s magazine and published his second volume of poetry, War Is Kind, the weak novel

Active Service, and the American edition of "The Monster” and Other Stories. During a Christmas party that

year Crane nearly died of a lung hemorrhage. Surviving only a few months, he summoned the strength to

write a series of nine articles on great battles and complete the first twenty­five chapters of the novel The

O'Ruddy. In spite of Cora s hopes for a miraculous cure and the generous assistance of Henry James and

others, Crane died, at Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900.

W. D. HOWELLS

1837­1920

As a steadily productive novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, reviewer, and editor W. D. Howells Was always

in the public eye, and his influence during the 1880s and 1890s on a growing, serious, middle­class

readership was incalculable. In his writings an entire generation discovered, through his faithful description

of familiar places, his dramatizations of ordinary lives, and his shrewd analyses of shared moral issues, its

tastes, its social behavior, its values, and its problems. Howells was: by temperament genial and modest, but

he was also forthright and tough­minded. He was, as critic Lionel Trilling has observed, a deeply civil man

with a balanced senses of life. Perhaps that is why when he died, in 1920, the spontaneous outpouring of

sorrow and admiration was the kind reserved for national heroes.

Howells was born, one of eight children, in the postfrontier village of Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, on March 1, 1837,

to a poor, respectable, proud, and culturally informed family. Like his contemporary Samuel L; Clemens and

his predecessor Ben Franklin, Howells went to school at the printer’s office, setting type for* the series of

unsuccessful newspapers that his good­natured, somewhat impractical father owned. Though the family

moved around a good deal in Ohio, Howells’s youth was emotionally secure and, on the whole, happy. His

mother, he observed, had the gift of making each child feel that he or she was the center of the world.

From his earliest years Howells had both literary passions and literary ambitions. When he was not setting

type or reading Oliver Goldsmith, Washington Irving, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, William

Makepeace Thackeray, or other favorites, he was teaching himself several foreign languages. Howells tried

his hand at a number of literary forms in his teens, but his first regular jobs involved reporting for newspapers

in Columbus and Cincinnati. It was as a journalist that he made his first pilgrimage to New England in 1860,

where he was welcomed by such literary leaders as James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph

Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who must have recognized that he possessed talent and the will

to succeed as well as courtesy and deference.

A campaign biography of Lincoln, his first significant book, won for Howells the consulship at Venice in

1861. There he wrote a series of travel letters, eventually published as Venetian Life (1866), that made his

name known in eastern literary circles. After returning to America in 1866, he worked briefly for the Nation

in New York until James T. Fields offered him the assistant editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, to which he

had contributed some of his earliest verse before the war. (Like a good many American authors, Howells

published little poetry once he committed himself to other forms.) In effect, Howells assumed control of the

magazine from the very beginning, and he succeeded officially to the editorship in 1871, a position he held

until resigning in 1881 to have more time to write fiction. Because the Atlantic was the preeminent literary

magazine of the day, Howells had, as a young man, the power to make or break careers, a power he exe