First published in 1893, when Stephen Crane was only twenty-one years old, Maggie is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s fall into prostitution and destitution in New York City’s notorious Bowery slum. In dazzlingly vivid prose and with a sexual candour remarkable for his day, Crane depicts an urban sub-culture awash with alcohol and patrolled by the swaggering gangland “tough.” Presented here with its companion piece George’s Mother and a selection of Crane’s other Bowery stories, this edition of Maggie includes a detailed introduction that places the novel in its social, cultural, and literary contexts.
The appendices provide an unrivalled range of documentary sources covering such topics as religious and civic reform writing, slum fiction, the “new journalism,” and literary realism and naturalism. An up-to-date bibliography of scholarly work on Crane is also included.
Comments
“Adrian Hunter’s elegant introduction and judicious selection of essential contextual documents by Crane and his contemporaries make this edition of Maggie wonderfully useful for students, teachers, and interested readers.” — Michael Robertson, The College of New Jersey, author of Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature
“Adrian Hunter’s introduction is elegantly written and solidly researched. Many less perceptive critics have tended to apply broad labels to Crane and his work, but Hunter has provided a wonderfully nuanced and sophisticated analysis of this often neglected text and the complex social and historical context from which it emerges. The edition is intelligently organized and carefully annotated; I found the appendices on reform movements and on slum fiction particularly useful.” — Susan Castillo, King’s College, London
