Stephen Crane had a relatively short life and so a short career. Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871 and died in 1900. He moved to New York City and lived as a free lance writer for newspapers. He used his position to study the conditions on the Bowery and wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets based on what he learned there. This was in 1891 and was his first novel. He was fired from his newspaper job, and in fact, he was not successful as a reporter, for what he wrote was usually rich in impressions but often lacked the basic facts of the event.
Crane was born after the Civil War, but it always fascinated him. He read widely on the subject, and he also held endless conversations with Civil War veterans. The book he wrote on the subject, The Red Badge of Courage, would be the first to tell not just what a soldier did but how he felt. The book was first published in installment form in the Philadelphia Press, and the work would not appear in book form until 1895 while the authors was traveling in the West, the southwest, and Mexico. Crane achieved success and fame with this work, but he still never managed to make much money from his work.
The Gilded Age was the name given to the period around 1870 when considerable cynicism set in about politics and other aspects of society. Mark Twain used the term as the title for a book, an attack on the materialism, speculation, and corruption seen in the era after the Civil War (Howard 200). In literary terms, the period as marked by a growing sense of realism. The beginnings of Naturalism as a literary movement came in the 1890s and extended realism with a new emphasis. The realists had insisted on detailing the world in a realistic fashion and to do so by creating reality: "Art's task was not to record but to make life; reality was a constructed, not a recorded, thing" (Bradbury 8). Naturalism took a different view in its origins, and now the task of the novelist...