Frederick Douglass

(1818-1895)

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and was separated from his mother soon after his birth.

Since records were not kept of the birth of slaves, Douglass was never sure of his exact age: Although Douglass received no formal education as a child, he did teach himself to read with the help, at first, of members of the household he served. Later, these same people became furious when they saw Douglass reading a book or a newspaper; "education and slavery," they decided, "are incompatible with each other." When Douglass was about twenty-one, started to make public speeches in support of me abolitionist cause. He took the name "Douglass" from the hero of Sir Walter Scott's romantic novel The Lady of the Lake.

Douglass founded a newspaper, the North Star. In his newspaper, Douglass championed the abolition of slavery. In 1855, he published a revised version of his life's story, entitled My Bondage and My Freedom. These "escape" narratives, like the earlier "captivity" stories, were enormously popular, and Douglass's were widely read and most influential in the abolitionist cause.

In 1882, he published yet another version of his autobiography, entitled Life and times of Frederick Douglass. Douglass has been compared with Benjamin Franklin, another self-made man who struggled against tremendous odds to achieve distinction at a critical time in his nation's history. But Douglass's story, of course, is different from Franklin's. Franklin was never a slave. Today Douglass is revered for the courage with which he insistently proclaimed his profoundly humane values, and admired for the quiet eloquence of his writing style.

Stephen Crane

(1871-1900)

He lived at the Art Students' League on Twenty-third Street, reporting intermittently for the Herald and the Tribune, exploring the city's slums and saloons, and writing his first significant fiction about his experiences. This was Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a somber, somewhat shocking novel, whose plot involved brutality, alcoholism, prostitution, and suicide.

Crane's subject matter and style in Maggie revealed him as a pioneer of naturalism, the literary movement which went beyond realism in its dissection of human instincts and behavior, and of the social environment that was believed to "condition" people to be what they are. Furthermore, Maggie broke other new ground; it was one of the first novels to use the city and its all-too-real slums as a setting. Maggie was impossibly grim for the popular magazines, and Crane borrowed $700 to have it printed in 1893. The copies of the little yellow paperback lay piled in his rented room for want of readers.

But a literary triumph followed soon after Crane's apparent failure with Maggie. In the summer of 1893, he finished a short novel entitled The Red Badge of Courage. This story focused on the impressions of Henry Fleming, a young soldier at the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville.

Whatever his sources, Crane managed to produce an extraordinary work that not only persuaded the war's veterans of its essential truth but also provided an arresting psychological study of the ordinary man thrust into war. The impressionistic technique used by Crane in the novel would have an important influence on the fiction of the next several decades.

In fiction, impressionism is a technique whereby the writer gives us not objective reality, but one character's impression of that reality. In other words, in The Red Badge of Courage, we get Henry Fleming's impressions of what he sees and feels and hears of the war, not a description of what is actually happening.

The Reel Badge of Courage, published in 1895, sold so widely that in the following year Crane's publishers reissued Maggie. The renown of The Red Badge of Courage made Crane into a national expert on war, and he was to spend the rest of his short life writing about it for the newspapers. His celebrity was such that he also became the prototype of the adventurous correspondent who not only writes about sensational events but also lives a sensational life, delighting in shocking conservative readers.

One of the fascinating elements of Crane's life was the degree to which he interwove his fiction and his real-life experiences. It was as if he had invented a war in his novel, and then had to pursue the brushfire wars of his own times in order to confirm what he had written.