The Black Riders: and other lines

Stephen Crane

jun 2008 · Freshwater Seas · Verteld door Robert Bethune

Over dit audioboek

In 1894, when Stephen Crane was just twenty-two years old, he showed his friend, Hamlin Garland, a set of poems in manuscript. Garland showed them to John D. Barry, who arranged for a public reading of the new work. Crane could not summon up the courage to read the poems, or even attend the reading; he waited outside on the street while Barry read them.

The publishing firm of Copeland and Day took on the work, and Stephen Crane was a published poet. Six months later, The Red Badge of Courage appeared, and Stephen Crane's literary career was on its way. He still didn't have enough money to live on, but his work had reached the public. Just six years later, he was dead of tuberculosis.

Today, over a hundred years later, his poems are incredibly fresh. Torn by a sense of his own sin, outraged by the capricious behavior of a God he rejected, his poems brim with bitteness, yet carry with them a sane and sarcastic humor as well. Tremendously laconic and always moving directly to the point, he demands his listener's full attention, and rewards it.

A Freshwater Seas production.

Over de auteur

Stephen Crane authored novels, short stories, and poetry, but is best known for his realistic war fiction. Crane was a correspondent in the Greek-Turkish War and the Spanish American War, penning numerous articles, war reports and sketches. His most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage (1896), portrays the initial cowardice and later courage of a Union soldier in the Civil War. In addition to six novels, Crane wrote over a hundred short stories including "The Blue Hotel," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and "The Open Boat." His first book of poetry was The Black Riders (1895), ironic verse in free form. Crane wrote 136 poems. Crane was born November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. After briefly attending Lafayette College and Syracuse University, he became a freelance journalist in New York City. He published his first novel, Maggie: Girl of the Streets, at his own expense because publishers found it controversial: told with irony and sympathy, it is a story of the slum girl driven to prostitution and then suicide. Crane died June 5, 1900, at age 28 from tuberculosis.