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  • Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire by Paul Sorrentino
  • John Clendenning
Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire. By Paul Sorrentino. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2014. 495 pp. Cloth, $39.97.

The publication of Paul Sorrentino’s life of Crane raises important questions about the art of literary biography. What do we expect or anticipate when we open a book-length study of an author’s life? First, and perhaps most important, we expect a thoroughly researched, factually accurate, and clearly documented text. Second, but almost equal in importance, we expect to be engaged with an interesting narrative, a story engrossingly told of the writer’s life contextualized in its surrounding social environment. Third, we want to arrive at an understanding of this person in all of the psychological complexities that constitute what we call personality. Fourth, we want to gain new insight into the author’s works by seeing the writing as an extension or manifestation of its writer. Finally, though this is not always a reasonable expectation, we hope that the biographer will uncover something new in the writer’s life not previously known or highlighted, and thus deposit some nugget of thought that can transform our reading of the texts. There is certainly more to the art of literary biography than this, but these five points will, for the moment, suffice.

Without question, Sorrentino’s Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire satisfies the first of these expectations and this fact alone makes it outstanding. For more than a quarter of a century, Sorrentino has been the central figure in the resurgence of Stephen Crane in the canon of nineteenth-century American literature. Well known and highly regarded among scholars in his field, Sorrentino partnered with Stanley Wertheim to edit The Correspondence of Stephen Crane (1988); also with Wertheim he compiled the indispensable Crane Log (1994); and alone he edited Stephen Crane Remembered (2006), an important collection of reminiscences. For more than twenty years he has served as Secretary/Treasurer of the Stephen Crane Society and editor of Stephen Crane Studies. Without exception Sorrentino knows more about Crane than anyone still active in the field and is indisputably the one best prepared to write the definitive biography.

This is not to say that he alone fulfills all of the criteria that constitute the art of literary biography. Other studies of Crane’s life endure, and while none supersedes Sorrentino’s scholarly biography, each has its own place forte [End Page 84] in the battleground of letters. Thomas Beer, now discredited because of his forgeries, nevertheless produced a tender and commanding study of Crane’s life in 1923, reintroducing readers to a writer in almost total eclipse. John Berryman, with an engaging, slapdash, quirky style, wrote one of the first Freudian biographies, and though it has been dismissed as psychobabble by most literal-minded scholars, Berryman’s Stephen Crane takes its place with Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville—both published in 1950—as one of two enduring contributions to the American Men of Letters Series.

Then, of course, there is the astonishing instance of R. W. Stallman, who spent most of his professional life struggling to make Crane his personal academic property. If Beer was unreliable and Berryman was irresponsible, there is probably no more apt adjective for Stallman than paranoid. Though memorably creative in his reading of The Red Badge of Courage—that unforgettable bloody wafer!—Stallman positioned himself at the apex of Crane scholars and thus regarded others as enemies. His Stephen Crane (1968)— long anticipated as the standard biography—turned out to be a sprawling undocumented mishmash in which the subject is transformed into a mass of undigested index cards.

Along the way, the shadowy figure of Melvin Schoberlin lurks. A decorated naval officer in World War II, Schoberlin devoted more than three years, following his separation from active service in 1946, to a doomed project. He collected all of Crane’s writings, many letters, other documents, and memorabilia; he wrote a draft of a biography—unfortunately titled “Flagon of Despair: Stephen Crane”—only to have the whole project flatly rejected by Herbert Weinstock, his editor at Knopf. The script does present...

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