BiblioVault - Books about Sorrentino, Paul

The Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane

Harvard University Press, 2009

Stephen Crane’s weirdly impressionistic The Red Badge of Courage is one of the first non-romantic novels of the Civil War—and the first nonromantic account to gain wide popularity. Paul Sorrentino introduces Red Badge to a new generation of readers for a fuller appreciation of the novel and its effects. He has selected as his text the first edition, published by D. Appleton & Co. in 1895.

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Stephen Crane

A Life of Fire

Paul Sorrentino

Harvard University Press, 2014

With the exception of Poe, no American writer has proven as challenging to biographers as the author of The Red Badge of Courage. Stephen Crane’s short, compact life—“a life of fire,” he called it—continues to be surrounded by myths and half-truths, distortions and outright fabrications. Mindful of the pitfalls that have marred previous biographies, Paul Sorrentino has sifted through garbled chronologies and contradictory eyewitness accounts, scoured the archives, and followed in Crane’s footsteps. The result is the most complete and accurate account of the poet and novelist written to date.

Whether Crane was dressing as a hobo to document the life of the homeless in the Bowery, defending a prostitute against corrupt New York City law enforcement, or covering the historic charge up the San Juan hills as a correspondent during the Spanish-American War, his adventures were front-page news. From Sorrentino’s layered narrative of the various phases of Crane’s life a portrait slowly emerges. By turns taciturn and garrulous, confident and insecure, romantic and cynical, Crane was a man of irresolvable contradictions. He rebelled against tradition yet was proud of his family heritage; he lived a Bohemian existence yet was drawn to social status; he romanticized women yet obsessively sought out prostitutes; he spurned a God he saw as remote yet wished for His presence.

Incorporating decades of research by the foremost authority on Crane’s work, Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire sets a new benchmark for biographers.

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Stephen Crane Remembered

Edited by Paul Sorrentino

University of Alabama Press, 2006

Revealing episodes in the life of the elusive writer, as told by acquaintances

This book collects reminiscences by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Stephen Crane that illuminate the life of this often misunderstood and misrepresented writer. Although Crane is widely regarded as a major American author, conclusions about his life, work, and thought remain obscure due to the difficulties in separating fact from fiction. His first biographer recorded mostly vague impressions and, to mythologize his subject, invented a multitude of the episodes and letters used in his account of Crane’s life. Subsequent biographies were either cursory summations or compendiums of verifiable facts. Crane himself was both reclusive and mercurial, protective of his inner life while projecting a variety of personae to suit others.

A flamboyant personality and close friend of writers such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, Crane made telling impressions on his contemporaries. They often constitute the best assessments of Crane’s own personality and work. The 90 reminiscences gathered here offer a much-needed account of Crane’s life from a variety of viewpoints, as well as important information about the contributors themselves.

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