Stephen Crane

Maggie Stephen Crane

Maggie, Although her fellow novelists William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland immediately recognized the genius of the twenty-one-year-old author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, by 1893 most readers were unwilling to accept her unconventional theme and felt uncomfortable with a style that was both darkly naturalistic and vividly impressionistic. Today Maggie is regarded as an American classic, the first of an impressive group of works in which Crane explored the hidden side of urban life, portraying the rise of the metropolis as it alters not just the human environment but the human nature itself.