Crane lived in a world of brutal poverty-and also one of expanded cultural possibilities that made possible his avant-garde practice, and his moral realism.Д«y the age of twenty, Crane was a reporter. The family was intimately entangled in the great and liberating crusade for womenвЂ™s suffrage, which was also tied to the notably misguided crusade for prohibition. The book comes fully to life when it evokes the fabric of the Crane family in New Jersey. Early in the book, Auster provides, alongside those inventions, a roll call of American sins from the period of CraneвЂ™s youth: Wounded Knee, the demise of Reconstruction, and so on-all of which, however grievous, happened far from the Crane habitat.

How did he get to be so good so young? Crane was born in Newark in 1871, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister and his politically minded, temperance-crusader wife. So is the embrace of an unembarrassed sexual realism in вЂњMaggie,вЂќ which preceded DreiserвЂ™s вЂњ Sister CarrieвЂќ by almost a decade. The tone of taciturn minimalism that Hemingway seemed to discover only after the Great War-with its roots in newspaper reporting, its deliberate amputation of overt editorializing, its belief that sensual detail is itself sufficient to make all the moral points worth making-is fully achieved in CraneвЂ™s work. Everything that appeared innovative in writing which came out a generation later is present in his вЂњMaggie: A Girl of the StreetsвЂќ (1893) and вЂњThe Red Badge of CourageвЂќ (1895). No, Auster plainly loves Crane-and wants the reader to-for CraneвЂ™s own far-from-sweet sake.ДЄnd Auster is right: Crane counts. The quotations from CraneвЂ™s harsh, haiku-like poems spit out from AusterвЂ™s gently loquacious pages in unmissable disjunction. A postmodern luxuriance of reference and a plurality of literary manners is central to AusterвЂ™s own writing in this book, the opening pages alone offer a list of some seventy-five inventions of CraneвЂ™s time. Indeed, Crane got this kind of homage in a brief critical life from the poet John Berryman in the nineteen-fifties, a heavily Freudian interpretation in which Berryman was obviously identifying a precedent for his own cryptic American poetic vernacular in CraneвЂ™s verse collections вЂњThe Black RidersвЂќ and вЂњWar Is Kind.вЂќД«ut Auster, voluminous in output and long-breathed in his sentences, would seem to have little in common with the terse, hard-bitten Crane. Mencken, praising an inheritance of bile alleviated by humor. And so we get John Updike on William Dean Howells, extolling the virtues of charm and middle-range realism, or Gore Vidal on H.

Usually, when a well-established writer turns to an earlier, overlooked exemplar, there is an element of self-approval through implied genealogy: вЂњMeet the parents!вЂќ is what the writer is really saying. A detailed, nearly eight-hundred-page account of the brief life of the author of вЂњ The Red Badge of CourageвЂќ and вЂњThe Blue Hotel,вЂќ augmented by readings of his work, and a compendium of contemporary reactions to it, it seems motivated purely by a devotion to CraneвЂ™s writing. Paul AusterвЂ™s вЂњ Burning Boy: The Life and Work of StephenВ CraneвЂќ (Holt) is a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters.

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