The first biography of the short-lived novelist, published in 1923, seems to have been largely made-up. What scholars have put together since “enables us to piece together a new Stephen Crane: a figure as driven to prove his manhood as Jack London; as plaintive about his broken faith as Herman Melville; and as ironic about his personal self, and as recklessly disinclined to take conventional sexual morals seriously, as Oscar Wilde.”
