Stephen Crane
Crane is a good candidate for some questions. I don't have a summary of "The Blue Hotel," but have given you a quote that appeared on some of my practice tests.
From Wikipedia:
His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Crane released the book under a pseudonym and paid for the publishing himself. It was not a commercial success, though it was praised by several critics of the time.
This was followed by The Red Badge of Courage 1895, a powerful tale
of the American Civil War. The book won international acclaim for its realism
and psychological depth in telling the story of a young soldier facing the
horrors and triumphs of war for the first time. Crane never experienced battle
personally, but conducted interviews with a number of veterans, some of whom
may have suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Because his depiction of the psychological as well as military aspect of war
was so accurate, he was hired by a number of newspapers as a correspondent
during the Greco-Turkish 1897 and Spanish-American wars 1898. In 1896 the
boat in which he accompanied an American expedition to Cuba was wrecked, leaving
Crane adrift for fourteen days. A result of the incident was Crane's development
of tuberculosis, which would eventually become fatal. He recounted these experiences
in The Open Boat and Other Tales 1898. In 1897, Crane settled in
England, where he befriended writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James.
Shortly before his death, he released Whilomville Stories 1900, the
most commercially successful of the twelve books he wrote. Crane died
of tuberculosis, aged only 28, in Badenweiler, Germany.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
Names and phrases to associate with Maggie:
- Maggie
- Jimmie
- Pete
As the novel opens, Jimmie, a young boy, is leading a street fight against a troop of youngsters from another part of New York City's impoverished Bowery neighborhood. Jimmie is rescued by Pete, a teenager who seems to be a casual acquaintance of his. They encounter Jimmie's offhandedly brutal father, who brings Jimmie home, where we are introduced to his timid older sister Maggie and little brother Tommie, and to Mary, the family's drunken, vicious matriarch. The evening that follows seems typical: the father goes to bars to drink himself into oblivion while the mother stays home and rages until she, too, drops off into a drunken stupor. The children huddle in a corner, terrified.
As time passes, both the father and Tommie die. Jimmie hardens into a sneering,
aggressive, cynical youth. He gets a job as a teamster. Maggie, by contrast,
seems somehow immune to the corrupting influence of abject poverty; underneath
the grime, she is physically beautiful and, even more surprising, both hopeful
and naïve. When Pete--now a bartender--makes his return to the scene,
he entrances Maggie with his bravado and show of bourgeois trappings. Pete
senses easy prey, and they begin dating; she is taken--and taken in--by his
relative worldliness and his ostentatious displays of confidence. She sees
in him the promise of wealth and culture, an escape from the misery of her
childhood.
There comes a night when the drunk and combative Mary accuses Maggie of going
"to deh devil" and disgracing the family; Maggie runs into Pete's
arms, and we are given to understand that the two are, indeed, sleeping together.
Jimmie is furious that Pete has "ruined" his sister, and he gets
very drunk with a friend and gets into a brawl with Pete. After this, Maggie
leaves home and goes to live with Pete. Jimmie and Mary affect sorrow and
bewilderment at Maggie's fall from grace, and her behavior becomes a neighborhood
scandal. A scant few weeks after Maggie leaves home, she is in a bar with
Pete when they meet Nellie, a scheming woman with a veneer of sophistication
who has no trouble convincing Pete to leave Maggie. Abandoned, Maggie tries
to return home, but her family rejects her.
The linear narrative now ceases, and we are given a series of scenes, arranged
in chronological order but separated by passages of time. There is an interlude
in which we see that Jimmie, who acts horrified at Maggie's actions, has in
fact himself seduced and then abandoned at least one girl. In another brief
scene, Maggie visits Pete at work, and he, too, refuses to acknowledge her
legitimate claims on him. Months later, we are shown a prostitute--presumably
Maggie, but unnamed--walking the streets of New York, pathetic and rejected,
bound for trouble. There is a scene with Pete in a bar, badly drunk and surrounded
by women; he collapses on the floor and, in his turn, is abandoned by the
scornful and manipulative Nellie. Finally, the novel ends with Jimmie giving
Mary the news that Maggie's dead body has been found. Mary stages a scene
of melodramatic mourning for her ruined child, which ends with her deeply
hypocritical and bitterly ironic concession: "I'll fergive her!"
"The Blue Hotel"
This is a story about a hotel in Nebraska which sits near the rail raod tracks. Essentially, it is the tale of a Swede who, upon arriving, thinks that he is in the old West and comports himself as such, which causes conflict, ultimately leading to the Swede's death in a bar fight.
A famous passage from "The Blue Hotel":
"He might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. However, the Swede found a saloon."