Often used interchangeably, the terms noir and hard-boiled actually refer to different kinds of works. While hard-boiled stories tend to deal with detectives confronting violence and organized crime, detectives who all the while comment on both the events transpiring as well as their own experiencing of those events (think Dashiell Hammet’s Maltese Falcon or Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep), noir tends to deal with more atmospheric adventures wherein the protagonist is more often a victim or a criminal (think James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, or the works of David Goodis, upon whose stories the films The Fugitive and Tirez Sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) are based). Although noir finds its origins variously in French and American sources, the heart of the hard-boiled story is purely American.

The heyday of American examples of the genres was undoubtedly the 30s, 40s and 50s; nevertheless, modern adaptations both in fiction and film abound. The films of the Coen brothers often draw heavily on the tradition of both noir and hard-boiled stories from America’s past. Perhaps one of the most interesting adaptations of the genres, however, comes not from the US, but rather from the north of Europe in the form of Scandinavian noir.

Scandinavian noir owes much to the traditions discussed above. However, as prime examples of the genre show, there are subtle differences; the writing is often sparse, sharp, simple and realistic and the plots often carry heavy moralistic undertones. Progenitors of the genre include Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose Martin Beck series of novels depict a tumultuous Sweden of the 1960s, bent on revolution and social upheaval. Perhaps more well known examples include Henning Mankell's Wallender series, and Stieg Larsson's internationally best-selling Millenium series, the first of which, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been adapted for the big screen twice in the course of just two years. Clearly the fascination with unsolved murder and illicit dealings is alive, well, and spreading around the globe!

You may have read about Maggie in a previous blog post. Written when Crane was just 21, Maggie is the story of a poor city girl who, friendless and desperate, turns to prostitution to survive. In 1893, no respectable publisher would risk his reputation on such a book. So Crane paid an unknown publisher to print the book, using his own very limited funds. (This publisher did not even put his name in the book, so grave was his concern about its contents — and even Crane used a pseudonym.) As you can imagine, these circumstances did not lend themselves to the production of a durable, handsome object. Maggie was printed on cheap paper with a cheap paper cover and a staple binding.

Cover, before and after

Fast forward 120 years: this modest little paperback is now incredibly rare, precisely because of its lowly origins. Crane couldn’t afford to print that many copies; initially seen as a failure, few copies of the novella were preserved. Those that did survive into the twentieth century degraded over time. Combine its scarcity with its eventual rediscovery as a key text of late nineteenth-century American literature — not to mention the fact that our copy features an inscription by Crane on the cover — and voilà, you’ve got a very special book, albeit one that looks... rather shabby. The Sheridan Libraries’ copy of 1893 Maggie is about as desperate as Maggie herself: faded, fragile, falling apart.

How to display such a delicate object? Enter the conservator.

Rusty staples

Usually it’s the job of a conservator to try to save as much as is possible of the original structure and materials of an artifact. However, sometimes, like with Maggie, something about the original is causing damage. As mentioned above, Maggie has no sewing to hold her together – just two (now rusty) steel staples and some (now brittle) animal glue on the spine. This not only made it tricky to open the book fully, it also led to stress points at the covers such that the back cover was lost and the front cover was fully detached – with first and last pages at risk of being not too far behind.

Photostat "repair," before and after

It also turns out that this is not the first time that Maggie has encountered a “restoration” treatment. Noticing that the bottom half of the last page of the text was missing, someone kindly found another copy of Maggie, took a Photostat image of the missing half of the last page, and used it to fill in the lost piece. Unfortunately, it was left as a negative image – white text on a photographic silver-based black background. The rigidity of the photographic paper was also pulling and damaging the much softer wood pulp paper of the rest of Maggie.

The conservation of Maggie therefore looked something like this:

1)      Carefully lifting what was left of Maggie’s spine and front cover, the book was taken apart, and each page surface cleaned with erasers to remove surface dirt.

2)      As for the old Photostat repair, it was Photoshop to the rescue! Taking a high resolution scan of the Photostat, using color inversion and a bit of touch-up in the software, and then using pigment-based inks printed on Japanese paper of sympathetic weight and color, it was possible to create a more subtle and suitable repair page.

3)      Paper repairs were performed where necessary (using Japanese tissues and wheat starch paste adhesive), and then Maggie’s textblock was put back together – this time by sewing with a chain stitch. This is a very inconspicuous type of sewing that will allow the aesthetics of Maggie to stay the same (flat back), but give her full "openability" – relieving the stresses that the staples were causing.

Sewing and reconstruction

4)      To repair her paper covers (being very careful to test the stability of the Stephen Crane inscription!), Maggie’s remaining front cover was washed, deacidified and then lined onto a mustard-colored Japanese Matsuo Kozo paper, leaving enough space to make the back cover out of this same piece of paper.

5)      Putting Maggie all back together, the top edge of the new cover was trimmed to align with the top of the textblock and attached to the textblock. The remaining edges were trimmed AFTER the cover was in place – just to make sure everything lined up. Finally, the pieces of Maggie’s original spine that were saved were adhered in place.

Title page, before and after

So after her trip to the conservation lab, Maggie is all ready for exhibition and use! Back in one piece, stable for handling, and aesthetically looking a lot like when she was first published. Of course… if you look closely, you can see exactly where all her repairs are. After all, the guidelines for conduct and code of ethics to which conservators adhere say that “Any intervention to compensate for loss should be documented in treatment records and reports and should be detectable by common examination methods.” But I won’t tell if you don’t – the full story will be kept safe in her conservation documentation, just in case anyone wants to know exactly what happened to Maggie on her trip to the “book doctor.”

The Red Badge of Courage raises two questions. First, with its straightforward presentation of its protagonist’s initial cowardice and eventual valor, is it a critique of war, an exaltation of battleground bravery, or simply a realistic portrayal of soldierly transformation? And secondly, how did Crane do it? Written thirty years after the war’s end by an author who had never seen military action, The Red Badge of Courage managed to create such a convincing sense of warfare that Civil War veterans claimed to have served with Crane.

The first question may be unanswerable. The second invites a bit of detective work. And that’s exactly what some undergraduates did this semester in our class “American Literature on Display.” After reading Crane’s novel, we examined some of the books and magazines of the late nineteenth century that Crane could have used to help him imagine the Civil War battlefields he so compellingly evoked. Students then described their research on our class blog.

We know that Crane read a series of articles about the Civil War in The Century Magazine. The many biographies, memoirs, criticisms and documents published in the “Civil War series” constituted a major national debate, and were eventually collected into a four-volume book. But what exactly did Crane glean from The Century? And what else might he have encountered in American print culture to shape his view of war? As it turns out, publications about the Civil War were voluminous at century’s end; Crane would have had access to a lot of material.

The Century often portrayed “war as a glorious entertainment, rather than a bloody conflict,” according to Katie Naymon. For example, “… the picture that… accompanies an article about the Battle of Bull Run… isn’t completely realistic… the focal point of the picture is a man on a horse, flag-waving, hand raised in victory.”

click any image to enlarge

This chivalric figure of victory seems to have been prevalent in the 1880s; Zoe Ovans discovers another work that also calls up “the image of a magnificent general, astride a gallant horse, posed and ready to outwit the enemy and defend his comrades… The Soldier in Our Civil War, a pictorial history of the American Civil War… focuses on the valor of the soldier in the field of battle… [One] image stands out among the rest: in the section describing the battle of Fischer’s Hill, there is a marvelous two-page spread featuring General Sheridan ‘riding along the lines of the Federal army.’”

Alyssa Zelicof notes, however, that while this volume “hones in on the gallantry and boldness of soldiers such as ‘Colonel Ash, Charging into J.E.B Stuart’s Camp, Near Charlottesville, V.A.’,” Crane’s narrative asks us to question that stereotype: “The sincere depiction of war given by Crane gives insight into the psyche of a soldier in battle, and forces one to question the thought process of soldiers such as Colonel Ash. As he charges gallantly into the camp, is he thinking about his children and wife at home? Although his face reads as unsympathetic, could he be silently praying to make it out of battle alive? Henry’s observations humanize the stoic actions of a soldier, and highlight the false depiction of bravery in war.”

The valor on display in the 1880s was not without precedent, as we learned when looking at materials published during or soon after the war. In fact, it can appear in some shocking places. Rachel Witkin finds a caricature of the heroic horseman in The Siege of Washington D.C.: Written Expressly For Little People, a strangely light-hearted history of 1867 that might help to explain why war often finds so many eager participants: “Children would most likely laugh at how ridiculous the general looks on his horse and think that war is nothing but a game, or think that the general looks important and want to enlist in war. The chapter name is even more chilling, as it suggests that war is a normal way to settle one’s differences. These children will glorify war, like Crane’s ‘youth’ did, and have no idea what’s actually in store for them.”

Civil War-era books not only romanticized war for children, but also romanticized the child who is already at war, as Tiffany Kim observes in A Selection of War Lyrics. The poem “The Color-Sergeant,” she explains, “is about a flag boy, Walter, who dies in battle. Moreover, it is about celebrating his death. A flag gives strong visual representation to otherwise intangible pride and morale. Therefore, the flag boy is extremely important to the idea of war, the idea being to protect what the flag represents. In the poem, Walter is honored for being a brave man and being ‘in the thick of the fight’ (line 14) to carry ‘the flag of the Free’ (line 4). Although he is not the big man on the battle field, he is seen as an important figure and a hero.”

Of course, for most Americans living through the Civil War, newspapers and magazines were important sources of information about wins, losses, casualties, advances. The Confederate press suffered from shortages of supplies and labor; many of the books published in the South in this period are poor in quality. The press of the North, without those constraints, was developing novel ways of delivering the news. Notable in this respect was Harper’s Weekly, with its many newsy illustrations. Since photographs could not be reproduced upon the printing press at this time—and since the paraphernalia of collodion process photography was too cumbersome, slow and fragile for action shots anyway—war-time images were conveyed through wood-engravings by artists like Thomas Nast and Winslow Homer.

These images served multiple purposes. Certainly, as Rosa Acheson notes, there were depictions of heroes. The cover of the issue for May 3, 1862, for example, contains eleven portraits of military leaders, each one framed like a keepsake. But these portraits seem more informational than epic. “Each portrait is a close up, showing just the torso and face, so we are really able to distinguish what each man looks like. Some of them have glasses, others mustaches. All of them, despite their war uniforms, look like regular men. Of course the public recognition of these men as Civil War heroes was earned. However, the intention here is instead to put a face to the brave actions, to characterize individuals who we otherwise might just consider a small part of the larger story.” Similarly, in a Harper’s picture called “The Captured Flag,” Bianca Kenworthy sees both the familiar image of bravery and an impulse towards factual accuracy that is in line with Crane’s story—and even surpasses it: “the trees and hill of the image’s landscape match those described in passages found in Crane’s novel; Crane’s emphasis on the confusion-laden regiments can be seen in the image by the clusters of people as well as those who are struggling and have fallen or been killed. However, as many similarities as there are, certain key and subtle differences between the picture and Crane’s prose should be noted. For example, Crane divorced his novel from any precise historical context by omitting dates and named locations whereas this image can be dated and placed, lending it a heightened sense of visual credibility.”

The tension inherent in war-time reporting, between baring the pain of sacrifices made and honoring and perhaps mythologizing those sacrifices, comes across even in personal narratives of the time, as Alex Hamm notes in his reading of The Boys in Blue, with its long nineteenth-century subtitle, Heroes of the “Rank and File.” Comprising Incidents and Reminiscences from Camp, Battle-Field, and Hospital, with Narratives of the Sacrifice, Suffering, and Triumphs of the Soldiers of the Republic. “In sharp contrast to the realism of Crane’s work of retrospective fiction, when we look at the visual representations that come from contemporary histories of the war, we see lots of order and decoration… this may have been a sort of propaganda by the illustrators of the 1860s in an effort to inspire the people after the Union victory… we can see the difference between what the people of the era wanted to believe and what they knew really was true.”

Several decades after the Civil War—around the time that Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage—half-tone technology was invented, allowing for the publication of photographs, and soon the war received another series of illustrated treatments. Do actual photographs of the war tell a more accurate story, without the temptations of heroic tales? Was Crane’s work a response, perhaps, to some new, more factual aesthetic? Well, if The Photographic History of the Civil War is any indication, maybe not. As Marah Formanek points out, this ten-volume series was published on the semi-centennial of the war, “as a token of remembrance and an explanation of the soldiers and the battles that occurred between 1861 and 1865. The photograph below depicts a scene of the Confederate soldiers, or the ‘Boys in Gray,’ before their first battle at Bull Run. They are young, jovial, and confident before their first encounter with the true tragedies of war. The photograph is captioned with the comment that, ‘there is not a serious face in the picture.’” Perhaps. But however you read the image, what is clear is that the commentators in 1911 were still expressing a kind of optimism that Crane, in contrast, was intent on challenging.

Watch this space for more from these students! They’ll be creating a digital exhibition to complement and extend “For Love or Money: Art, Commerce & Stephen Crane.”

The contest is open to all registered Johns Hopkins University students, and entrants must submit a bibliography of up to 50 items and an essay describing the collection.

“This contest is one of the highlights of the year at the libraries,” said Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums. “We are given the opportunity to learn about some fabulous collections and to meet the truly fascinating individuals from across the university who created these very personal book collections. I want to thank all who entered and to congratulate this year’s winners.”

First prize for the undergraduate division was awarded to Lily Boettcher, from the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, for her collection The Publication of American Values and the Formation of “Nation,” 1870-1915. There was a tie for first prize in the graduate category, with Krieger School student Amanda Zecca and Elisabet Pujadas, a student at the School of Medicine and the Whiting School of Engineering, each receiving top honors for their respective collections, From Berkeley to Black Mountain: Avant-Garde Poetry, 1945-1965 and Deconstructing Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Boettcher, Zecca, and Pujadas each received $1000 for their winning entries.

Second prize in the undergraduate category was awarded to Joseph Shaikewitz, from the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, for How Do You Spell Contemporary?: Defining, Discovering, and Displaying Today’s Art World. Janet Jai, also from the Krieger School, garnered second prize in the graduate division for poemArt and Its Predecessors (Finding Out Where I came From). Both Shaikewitz and Jai were awarded $500. There were no third place winners in either category this year.

“We are delighted that the overall quality of the entries not only has increased every year, but also that the 2013 event certainly has produced a bumper crop of exceptional merit, resulting in a graduate division first place tie for two especially remarkable and unique collections,” said Betty Sweren.

Selections from this year's winning entries will be on display on M-level of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library through July 1.

John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870) was a leading figure in Baltimore society during the mid-Nineteenth Century. A veteran of the War of 1812, he trained and worked as an attorney and was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates and the U.S. Congress; however, Kennedy’s true passion was writing.

In 1819, Kennedy began his first foray into the literary world in collaboration with Peter Hoffman Cruse on the periodical The Red Book, “a satiric potpourri in the Spectator tradition” (Bohner, 36). In addition to the periodical, Kennedy wrote three novels: Swallow Barn; or, a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832), Horse-Shoe Robinson, a Tale of the Tory Ascendency (1835), and Rob of the Bowl, a Legend of St. Inigoes (1838); the anti-Jacksonian satire Quodlibet (1840), Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt (1849) and published several speeches and papers.

He counted among his friends and personal acquaintances George Henry Calvert, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and William M. Thackeray. In his journal entries from September 1858, Kennedy wrote that Thackeray asked him for assistance with a chapter in The Virginians: Kennedy provided Thackeray with scenic descriptions of the Virginia landscape (Bohner, 219). However, there is a disputed account, perpetrated by John H. B. Latrobe in his article for Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, in which Kennedy is said to have written the fourth chapter of the second volume of The Virginians (Gwathmey, 131-33).

Additionally, Kennedy was an early champion and later patron of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he met after Poe won a writing contest, of which Kennedy was a judge, sponsored by the periodical, Saturday Visitor (Ridgely, 66).  John Pendleton Kennedy was one of the men chosen by George Peabody, whom he befriended when they served together in the War of 1812, to organize the creation of the Peabody Institute (est. 1857), a gift from Peabody to the city of Baltimore (Parker, 88-89).  Having served with distinction on the Board of Trustees and then as the second president of the Peabody Institute for a decade, John Pendleton Kennedy’s professional and personal association with George Peabody and the Institute led to his decision to bequeath his personal library and manuscripts to the Peabody Institute. In his Last Will and Testament, Kennedy writes:

I give to the Peabody Institute…my library, comprising all my books, pamphlets, maps and charts…and this I give as a special donation from me for the use of the Institute, but not to be kept as a circulating library, by which I mean, not to be taken out of the library rooms of the Institute for ordinary use. I also give to the Institute my several bound volumes of the manuscripts of my printed works, which I have preserved in the original MS. copies, as also my two bound volumes of autograph letters which have been written to me. These I give to the Institute with a special request that they be carefully preserved as a testimony of my interest in its success. (Tuckerman, 485).

JPK: His Legacy and His Influence on the George Peabody Library

Long overshadowed by the recognition and reputation afforded to George Peabody for his generous endowment to the city of Baltimore, John Pendleton Kennedy’s vision and dedication to the founding and initial governing of the Peabody Institute is remarkable. As early as 1841, Kennedy was an advocate for improving the city of Baltimore by establishing “a Free Public Library, a Museum and School of Art and provisions in the way of Lectures” (Tuckerman, 390).   In one of Kennedy’s last reports as President of the Peabody Institute, he wrote:

Our country is yet far from being gifted with a Library completely supplied to meet these requisites and fully to satisfy the research of students in their pursuit of that kind of knowledge which, being of rare demand, does not ordinarily find a place in private collections. And although this impediment to accurate research is gradually lessening before the awakened enterprise of the present time, still, it is our part, as I am sure it was Mr. Peabody’s wish we should so regard it, to use the munificent donation with which we are entrusted in the careful, persistent and intelligent application of our means to the gradual accumulation of everything notable in literature and science as necessary to the pursuits of the scholar. (Tuckerman, 399).

It is this same foresight, wisdom, and his numerous contributions which guarantee John Pendleton Kennedy a prominent and permanent place in the history of the Peabody Institute and the George Peabody Library.

• Humanities--Study and Teaching (Higher)--Data Processing
• Humanities--Research--Data Processing
• Information Storage and Retrieval Systems--Humanities

Jeesh!

Beyond just reading books (paradox that it is), what else can you do to keep up to date with DH, or even just get a basic foundation? This is a question my graduate students often ask me. Well, blogs are certainly one of the primary communications channels of the DH world. Here is a listing 20 of the best. Individual institutions also host DH blogs, like New York University, or MIT. I would add Digital Humanities Now and Stanford's blog to your reading list too.

Many of these blogs are linked to Twitter feeds, another *extremely* important DH communication channel. Try following one of the biggest names in DH, @nowviskie. That's Beth Nowviskie at UVA. Or #digitalhumanities. Wow. Hunting for good Twitter feeds on Google, I stumbled across this comprehensive list of resources. Such is the world of DH - endlessly rich and seemingly endless.

I'll close (for now) on a new DH resource, and one that illustrates a main concern of the digital humanities - the future of publishing. The MLA just brought online an evolving anthology of essays - Literary Studies in the Digital Age. This is perhaps the shape of things to come in scholarly humanities publishing. It at least bears watching.

Some other tips from Crane: you might try flunking out of college, twice; self-publishing a novel on the most shocking subject you can think of; living in a disgusting boarding-house with a bunch of medical students; disguising yourself as a homeless man in order to research a story… what? This isn’t what they teach in the Writing Sems?

You can learn more about Crane’s, um, unconventional approach to the writing life in the new exhibition For Love or Money: Art, Commerce & Stephen Crane, at the George Peabody Library in Mt. Vernon, which offers an unusual first-hand look at rare books, letters, photographs, and newspaper clippings documenting Crane’s literary output. The exhibition runs through June 14 and is free.

Crane got his first break as a teen-age journalist, writing up cultural events and fashion notes from the seaside resorts of New Jersey for New York newspapers. Not exactly Jersey Shore… but not entirely different. After the afore-mentioned aborted stint at college, he moved to New York and hung out with the city’s growing underclass: the denizens of saloons, flophouses, brothels, and tenements—the casualties of a nation dealing with a huge influx of immigrants and rapid industrialization. He got paid a few cents a word for his articles and stories about the urban poor—never quite enough to earn a decent living, but more than he would have gotten a decade or so earlier. He was able to scrape by because the newspapers and magazines that published his work were struggling to adapt to a new technological landscape (advances in printing machinery), new consumers (a lot of those immigrants were becoming literate) and increased competition. It was the time of “yellow journalism” and the great newspaper wars, when the New York World (owned by Joseph Pulitzer) and the New York Journal (owned by William Randolph Hearst) threw all kinds of juicy material at potential readers—political scandal, personal tragedy, celebrity gossip, sensational fiction—in the effort to attract customers.

Sure, Crane needed to sell his work, but he was also dedicated to what he called “the beautiful war” for truthful art; he wanted to write stories about real people dealing with real problems—which were often ugly or scary or sad. At the age of 21, he finished his first long work, a novella he called Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. (And yes, if “a girl of the streets” sounds salacious to you, you’re on the right track.) He couldn’t get a trade publisher to print Maggie because it was too risqué. So he used up a small inheritance and borrowed money from his brother to print it himself. He still couldn’t get anyone to buy it, however, so he tried his hand at guerilla marketing: he paid a couple of guys to sit on the elevated railways—the precursors to the subway—reading Maggie in full view of the crowd.

After the Maggie letdown, Crane was ready to write a potboiler. Perusing old copies of The Century Magazine, which ran a series on Civil War generals and battles, he decided to write a novel of the Civil War from a soldier’s point of view. But in the end, he couldn’t make himself color inside the stereotypic lines. The book that he produced is an utterly unique, vivid recreation of war from the perspective of a combatant. War from this angle isn’t a picture-perfect stage for glorious acts of heroism; it’s a messy roller-coaster ride of smoke, fear, bravery, pain, noise, solidarity and most of all, confusion. Ironically, Stephen Crane—who was born six years after the Civil War ended—had never seen military action. But even Civil War veterans were convinced by the story’s realism.

Watch this space for more about Crane’s break-through novel The Red Badge of Courage—and additional installments on the vicissitudes of the literary life, circa 1895.

JohnCon is the annual convention of JHU's very own Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (HopSFA). The con is held in Levering Hall, continuously (yes, non-stop) from 5PM on Friday evening until 5PM on Sunday. There are movies, board games, anime, laser tag, panels, Dungeons and Dragons, and best of all, many like-minded people who understand the respective souls of sci fi and fantasy.

What’s that? You think you can invent a board game that will capture the world’s imagination (and also make you rich)? Perhaps you can – pick up some pointers in Game Inventor’s Guidebook. It’s an e-book, so you can read it right now.

Ah, you’re more of a video game creator? Try these e-books about how to market them. Are dragons your thing? Check out the intriguing subject heading “dragons in art,” which includes such titles as Dracopedia: a Guide to Drawing the Dragons of the World.

And we have anime -- take a look at these books and films; amaze your friends with the fascinating facts you'll learn from The Anime Encyclopedia. Manga? Covered.

So enter the fantastical world of HopSFA this weekend!

The title of Things Fall Apart references a line in the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, turning the tables on modernist malaise in the wake of World War I. The poem begins:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Achebe, who was educated in Nigeria by European teachers who focused on European history, literature and art, asserts through his title an African perspective on social disintegration and reminds us that colonial rivalries in Africa helped to create the conditions for World War I.

Things Fall Apart modelled an inspiring new Afrocentric literary sensibility, but it also laid the groundwork for several generations of African writers in a more practical sense. After the amazing loss and recovery of the manuscript, the novel was published by William Heinemann and was then republished in 1962 as the first in Heinemann's African Writers Series, with Achebe as the series' editor.

In celebration of Chinua Achebe's life and literary achievement, take a look at these works by and about him.

“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own." — From The Education of a British-Protected Child

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.” — From an interview with The Paris Review

It all sounds very modern, very twenty-first century, right? But make a few changes to the paragraph above—remove the references to digital formats and adolescent vampires—and you’ve got a perfectly accurate description of the writing life circa 1895: the world of professional writing that Stephen Crane inhabited. You can get a close-up look at this world in For Love or Money: Art, Commerce & Stephen Crane, an exhibition of rare books, letters, historical magazines, and other cool old documents exploring Stephen Crane's work and the dilemmas of the writing life, from JHU's very own Wertheim-Frary Collection of Stephen Crane. The exhibition is on view at the George Peabody Library in Mt. Vernon from March 4 through June 14. And it’s free!

August Lundelius, Portrait of Stephen Crane in the early 1890s.

Stephen who, you say? Stephen Crane: you may have read his novel The Red Badge of Courage, or maybe Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Both are classic works of fiction from a time when the literary marketplace was undergoing enormous shifts. The newspaper industry was expanding, new magazines were popping up left and right, and book publishers were trying out colorful graphic bindings and illustrations in the effort to attract readers.  All of these changes had to do with technological advances in printing—like roller presses and wood-pulp paper-making—and major social transformations around the world.  In the United States, immigration, urbanization, and public education generated a new population of readers. Industrialization produced a new class of goods that could be sold nationally and internationally, which gave momentum to an important revenue stream for publishers: ads.  And the development of transportation networks across the country provided new ways to move commercial products—including reading material—from manufacturers to consumers. It was the apex of a great information age: the one just before our own.

The really interesting thing about Stephen Crane’s writing life is not just how his work documents all this cultural change—in his stories and books and articles about the urban poor, Western pioneers, soldiers, and small-town Americans—but also, how it exemplifies these changes, through the forms in which it was published. Sending a given piece to just the right magazine or newspaper, double-dipping in the English and American press, republishing stories in book form, Crane had to manipulate all the venues available to him—as well as his own reputation—in order to get by.

Watch this space for more about Stephen Crane’s career, and be sure to stop by the George Peabody Library for a first-hand glimpse of the writing life—circa 1895.