Stephen Crane was the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister in Newark, New Jersey, and he grew up surrounded by sermons against drink, cards and novels. He took up all three. After brief spells at two colleges, where he cared more about baseball than his classes, he went to New York to work as a freelance journalist, living poor and writing about the Bowery and the slums of the Lower East Side.

His first book, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), was a short, grim novel about a young woman destroyed by poverty. No publisher would touch it, so Crane borrowed money and printed it himself, under a made-up name. It barely sold.

His second novel made him famous. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) follows a young Union soldier, Henry Fleming, through his first battle in the Civil War: his terror, his running away, his shame, his return. It is told almost entirely from inside Henry’s head, in bright, strange images, and many veterans could not believe that its author had been born six years after the war ended. Crane said he had learned about combat from playing football.

He spent the rest of his short life looking for the real thing. He went to Florida to report on the rebellion in Cuba, and in the first days of January 1897 the ship he was traveling on sank off the coast. Crane and three other men spent some thirty hours in a small dinghy before they struggled through the surf to shore; one of them drowned. Out of that came “The Open Boat,” one of the finest short stories in American literature. He went on to report on wars in Greece and in Cuba.

He also wrote poems, short, plain and unrhymed, that look surprisingly modern: “In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, bestial.” In his last years he lived in an old manor house in Sussex with his companion, Cora, where his friends included Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H. G. Wells. He had tuberculosis, and he died in a sanatorium in Germany in 1900, at twenty-eight.