Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

A stone had smashed into Jimmie’s mouth. Blood was bubbling over his chin and down upon his ragged shirt. Tears made furrows on his dirt-stained cheeks. His thin legs had begun to tremble and turn weak, causing his small body to reel. (from “Maggie,” pages 7-8)

 

The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.

(from “Maggie,” page 22)

 

“Teh hell wid him and you,” she said, glowering at her daughter in the gloom. Her eyes seemed to burn balefully. “Yeh’ve gone teh deh devil, Mag Johnson, yehs knows yehs have gone teh deh devil. Yer a disgrace teh yer people, damn yeh.” (from “Maggie,” page 39)

 

As the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and saved his respectability by a vigorous sidestep. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he to know that there was a soul before him that needed saving? (from “Maggie,” page 64)

 

“I know he ain’t th’ kind a man I’d like t’ have you go around with. He ain’t a good man. I’m sure he ain’t. He drinks.”

(from “George’s Mother,” page 82)

 

He remembered Jones. He could not help but admire a man who knew so many bartenders. (from “George’s Mother,” page 93)

 

For three days they lived in silence. He brooded upon his mother’s agony and felt a singular joy in it.

(from “George’s Mother,” page .119)

 

From the dark and secret places of the building there suddenly came to his nostrils strange and unspeakable odors that assailed him like malignant diseases with wings. They seemed to be from human bodies closely packed in dens; the exhalations from a hundred pairs of reeking lips; the fumes from a thousand bygone debauches; the expression of a thousand present miseries.

(from “An Experiment in Misery,” page 138)

 

“I have been told all my life that millionaires have no fun, and I know that the poor are always assured that the millionaire is a very unhappy person.” (from “An Experiment in Luxury,” pages 145-146)

 

“Humanity only needs to be provided for ten minutes with a few whirligigs and things of the sort, and it can forget at least four centuries of misery. I rejoice in these whirligigs.”

(from “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” page 165)

 

And who should invade this momentary land of rest, this dream country, if not the people of the Tenderloin; they who are at once supersensitive and hopeless, the people who think more upon death and the mysteries of life, the chances of the hereafter than any other class, educated or uneducated? Opium holds out to them its lie, and they embrace it eagerly. (from “Opium’s Varied Dreams,” page 195)

 

The bicycle crowd has completely subjugated the street. The glittering wheels dominate it from end to end. The cafes and dining rooms or the apartment hotels are occupied mainly by people in bicycle clothes. Even the billboards have surrendered.

(from “New York’s Bicycle Speedway,” page 196)

NEW YORK

 

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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets was first published in 1893, and George’s Mother first appeared in 1896. The remaining sketches first appeared in a number of New York newspapers between 1894 and 1896.

 

Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes,
Biography, Chronology, An Inspiration for Crane’s Writings About New York,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2005 by Robert Tine.

Note on Stephen Crane, The World of Stephen Crane and His Writings About New York, An Inspiration for Crane’s Writings About New York, and Comments & Questions Copyright © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

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Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Writings About New York

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-248-2

eISBN : 978-1-411-43260-4

ISBN-10: 1-59308-248-7
LC Control Number 2005926185

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:
Fine Creative Media, Inc.
322 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America QM

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FIRST PRINTING

STEPHEN CRANE

Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, the fourteenth and last child of the Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck, a Methodist missionary. Stephen’s interest in war and the military developed early, and he convinced his mother to enroll him in the Hudson River Institute, a semi-military school in upstate New York. On the advice of a professor who urged him to pursue a more practical career than the army, Stephen transferred to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, to study mining engineering; however, he seldom attended class and failed a theme writing course because of poor attendance. His formal education ended after one semester at Syracuse University, where he was known on campus for his baseball skills. Despite his unimpressive academic performance, he wrote regularly while he was a student.

Stephen Crane became a prolific writer—of journalism and novels, short stories and poetry. By age twenty-three he had completed two major novels marked by an impressionism and a psychological realism that anticipated the “new fiction” of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. His writing of fiction is informed by the keen, precise observation that also made him a journalist; for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), he shadowed a New York prostitute for weeks. Crane was born after the Civil War, and he relied on secondary sources and his own intuition and emotional insights in creating The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the story of a young recruit’s experiences during one key battle. The book is often cited as the first modern novel.

While on assignment to cover the Cuban-Spanish conflict that preceded the Spanish-American war, Crane met his lifelong companion, Cora Stewart, a well-read daughter of old money who owned a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida. Crane and Stewart later lived in England, where they socialized with Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, who admired Crane’s unique writing style. The young American continued to publish novels, stories, and articles for journals, which solidified his reputation.

Illness cut Crane’s life short. In 1899, in Badenweiler, Germany, he collapsed with severe hemorrhaging of the lungs brought on by tuberculosis and malaria. He died in a sanitarium on June 5, 1900, five months before his twenty-ninth birthday.