Burning Boy
The Life and Work of Stephen Crane
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER
A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021
Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane.
With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight.
Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death.
In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of reading experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stephen Crane (1871–1900), the author of the classic war novel The Red Badge of Courage, cuts a dashing figure in this beguiling literary biography from novelist Auster (Moon Palace). Delving into Crane's tragically short and impossibly romantic life, Auster covers Crane's stint in New York as a freelance journalist, his international celebrity after the publication of his novel, a scandal in which Crane defended a prostitute from false charges of solicitation, the shipwreck that inspired his famous story "The Open Boat," his reporting under fire during the Spanish-American war, and his death from tuberculosis at the age of 28. Along the way, Auster intertwines the engrossing picaresque with probing interpretations of Crane's works that consider his intensely lyrical writing, vivid realism, and detached psychological dissections of his characters as they struggle with social isolation and nature ("Most people outgrow their childhood interests and occupations, but Crane never did," Auster writes). The author also highlights the shipmates that, Auster writes, showed Crane "the subtle, unarticulated brotherhood, which in a universe without meaning is man's only defense against unmitigated despair." Auster's sprawling narrative combines punchy writing and shrewd analysis with an exuberant passion for his subject. The result is a definitive biography of a great writer. Photos.
