Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Book excerpt: First published in 1893, when Stephen Crane was only twenty-one years old, Maggie is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s fall into prostitution and destitution in New York City’s notorious Bowery slum. In dazzlingly vivid prose and with a sexual candour remarkable for his day, Crane depicts an urban sub-culture awash with alcohol and patrolled by the swaggering gangland “tough.” Presented here with its companion piece George’s Mother and a selection of Crane’s other Bowery stories, this edition of Maggie includes a detailed introduction that places the novel in its social, cultural, and literary contexts. The appendices provide an unrivalled range of documentary sources covering such topics as religious and civic reform writing, slum fiction, the “new journalism,” and literary realism and naturalism. An up-to-date bibliography of scholarly work on Crane is also included.