Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews (review)

Throughout his scholarly career at Brown University, George Monteiro has established a reputation for delving into the periodicals of the past and rescuing wonderful tidbits of literary information from oblivion. Since the sixties he has published new finds from old newspapers nearly every year. In the 1977 installment of American Literary Scholarship, Hershel Parker said that Monteiro “has squinted at more microfilm and inhaled more dust from crumbling newspapers than anyone else.” I first met Professor Monteiro at the 1989 Stephen Crane conference in Blacksburg, Virginia, when I was still a graduate student. Learning Parker was my teacher, Monteiro said with a smile, “Hershel Parker says I’m always squinting.” He assured me that his eyes felt fine and that he planned to continue searching microfilm. By then, he already had started compiling Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews, a volume in the American Critical Archives series edited by M. Thomas Inge and published by Cambridge University Press. Now, two decades later, his collection has come to fruition.

The knowledge that Monteiro was working on this project all those years has influenced the rest of us interested in looking through old newspapers for Crane references. Once I finished graduate school and accepted my first tenure-track position, I discovered that my campus library had a complete run of the Manchester Guardian on microfilm. (What this frontier normal school was doing with such a great resource I have yet to discover.) I found some Mark Twain items in the Guardian, but I hesitated to spend time searching for Crane, assuming Monteiro had scoured the paper already. But curiosity got the better of me, so I scanned the Guardian in search of Crane. I found several reviews, which I gathered and published in 1993 in Stephen Crane Studies. The next time I saw Monteiro, he congratulated me on the reviews I had found but informed me that I had missed one or two Crane items in the Guardian. I searched numerous other newspapers on microfilm, but all that squinting affected me as it had not affected Monteiro. My eyes hurt so much that, sadly, I reached a point when I had to quit spending hours a day before a microfilm reader. Deprived of the personal opportunity to read microfilm extensively, I grew even more anxious for Monteiro’s collection of Crane reviews. Without it, I made do with Richard Weatherford’s Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage (1973), a fine collection in its own right but one that was not nearly as thorough as the other volumes in the American Critical Archives.

Monteiro’s hard work shows in Stephen Crane: The Contemporary Reviews, which reprints numerous reviews of Crane’s books from Maggie (1893) to The O’Ruddy (1903). Each chapter also lists additional reviews not reprinted in this collection. Noting that Crane’s contemporary recognition was a transatlantic phenomenon, Monteiro includes many reviews from Great Britain as well as the United States. This collection gives readers an excellent overview of Crane’s critical reception, which will prove useful for decades to come. With that said, a few caveats: Monteiro’s volume is fairly short. Earlier volumes in the American Critical Archives topped out at around five hundred pages. Monteiro’s is less than three hundred pages or, in other words, shorter than Weatherford’s similar collection. Instead of superseding Weatherford, Monteiro’s collection should be seen as a companion volume. Both are essential reading for every serious Crane scholar. One wishes Monteiro would have cross-referenced the checklists of additional reviews to Weatherford’s volume and other modern reprints of contemporary reviews.

Monteiro’s collection has some gaps. Apparently, the insular world of Brown University has given him an East Coast bias. Crane was reviewed in newspapers across the country, but that is hard to tell from this collection. Furthermore, Monteiro ignores some reviews others have found. His introduction quotes a 1910 journal entry by British litterateur Arnold Bennett, who recorded reading Bowery Tales, the London edition of...