Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane

By Paul Auster

From Booker Prize–shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster, a 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780771096938

Paul Auster

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.

Reviews for Burning Boy

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I chanced upon the work of Stephen Crane in an unusual way, not by being required to read his famous novel The Red Badge of Courage, but by finding his volume of poetry on the shelves of my high school library. It knocked my socks off and it became one of the first books I purchased for my library. I was perhaps sixteen.Over the years I read his most famous short stories and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, but still have not read Red Badge! (I will correct that soon.) I knew that Crane was the son of a Methodist pastor and that he had died young of tuberculosis. Then came Paul Auster’s book Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane.I had expected it to be a brief book, as brief as the writer’s life. Instead, I happily read it for over two weeks. For Auster also introduces readers to Crane’s work, including excerpts and critical insight. Readers do not need to be familiar with Crane’s work because it’s all covered. The novels, the poems, the short stories, the news stories, the first hand accounts of war.Auster intends to resurrect an interest in Crane, whose star has risen and fallen over the years. “The prose still crackles, the eye still cuts, the work still stings,” Auster writes. I know it struck me.Reading the excerpt from Crane’s short story The Blue Hotel, I read the line, “Every sin is the result of a collaboration.” It was like a revelation. Crane was twenty-six when he wrote that line. Sin is not what an individual commits; it is what a community commits when we deny our interdependence. “We are all responsible for one another,” Auster interprets; “No American writer since then has formulated anything that surpasses it.”Crane’s beloved father was a Methodist pastor. His early death send Crane spiraling into disbelief. He left home for New York City, where he shared an apartment and lived in poverty, sometimes without proper clothing to wear and eating one meal a day–a meal that came free with a 5 cent glass of beer. He hung out in bars and enjoyed the company of prostitutes. He fell for society women, a victim of unrequited love. He had a child and pledged his love to the woman, then left them. On the surface, he looked self-indulgent, a drop-out, but he was writing all of the time, thinking long before he set pen to paper. He wrote what he saw around him, telling the shocking truth.He was also brave, ignoring flying bullets while a war correspondent, and his actions during a shipwreck were heroic. (Leading to the story The Open Boat.)He was a loving uncle. He enjoyed music and silliness and fun. He loved dogs. He found his life partner late in life, a woman who had given up proper society for freedom. Cora became a mistress at seventeen, and had two failed marriages when she met Crane. She was running a Florida hotel with a salon that attracted society visitors. She walked away from it all to follow Crane. She thought Crane was a genius. “They were fine people,” wrote a woman who lived with them for some months; “They were good….They were ethically good. They were kind.”Crane was so good that it got his name into the New York City paper’s headlines. He had been with several women of the street when one was accused of solicitation by the police. Crane insisted she was under his protection and innocent and volunteered to be a witness at her court trial. The famous author of The Red Badge of Courage became a pariah. Even the police were on the lookout for him and he was on police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt’s bad side. He had to leave NYC.Crane was not a good businessman and his publishers, especially McClure’s Magazine, took advantage of him. Consequently, he was eternally in debt and in desperate need of cash. Always restless and always needing an income, Crane took jobs writing stories about world events, traveling to Greece and Cuba and to the Western states of America. He and Cora ended up in England where he hung out with the likes of Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. They believed Crane was a genius. A friend called him “the greatest genius America has produced since Edgar Allan Poe.”Auster shows how Crane’s writing broke new ground and was year ahead of its time. His love for Crane is infectious. I admit I was moved at the description of Crane’s death. And spurred to revisit the work I have read and to read the many stories I have not read.received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.