In 1925 Thomas Beer’s Stephen Crane, along with Wilson Follett’s twelve-volume The Work [sic] of Stephen Crane (1925–26), fixed Crane securely in the American canon. There had been a biography in 1923, by Thomas L. Raymond. Follett’s collected works had prefaces to individual volumes by Willa Cather (who met the young Crane in a Nebraska newspaper office), Carl Van Doren, Amy Lowell, and Henry Mencken. Beer’s charming biography had for an introduction a thirty-three-page essay by Joseph Conrad. Crane figures in the reminiscences of H. G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford, among others. No American student can get through high school or college without being assigned The Red Badge of Courage at least twice; and “The Open Boat,” “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and “The Blue Hotel” are standard stories in anthologies. The Library of America Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (1984, and now in its third printing), edited by J. C. Levenson, contains just over a hundred pieces. Crane was twenty-nine when he died in the Black Forest in Germany, in 1900, of tuberculosis.

Thomas Beer’s biography, a companion to his The Mauve Decade, is as readable as Lytton Strachey, the influence of whose style, sense of fun, and irony is obvious, and as lively as Mencken. Beer’s Crane is a kind of Penrod who evolves into one of O. Henry’s fly young men who have come to New York from the sticks eager