Stephen Crane — A Profile of the American Writer
Author of The Red Badge of Courage
In 1953 Ernest Hemingway was having a bad time with the critics: with his work likened to that of many who had gone before, most notably F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Dante, and Stephen Crane. Hemingway dismissed them all, except Stephen Crane, a writer he’d read and admired for years. In many ways Hemingway modelled himself on Crane, not just as a writer, but as a man of action who poured his experiences into his writing.
I’m sure, had the two men met, they may very well have got along. And although Crane died less than a year after Hemingway’s birth, he most certainly passed some literary magic to the infant Hemingway, who made something quite new out of it.
John Steinbeck (earlier in his career than Hemingway)was to suffer much he same criticism, as Steinbeck biographer, Jay Parini, describes:
“ The Raid is another story in which violence plays a key part, although Steinbeck’s focus is on the psychological consequences of violence rather than on the violence itself. Dick and Root, the protagonists, are versions of Mac and Jim in [Steinbeck’s] In Dubious Battle. (They also bear a strong resemblance to Henry Fleming and Jim Conklin in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which was obviously a model for Steinbeck, who seems to have lifted whole…
