Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American poet, novelist, and journalist. His best-known works, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, are widely regarded as two of the most innovative novels of the nineteenth century. After surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida—an experience he fictionalized in the short story “The Open Boat”—and reporting from battlefields in Cuba and Greece, Crane died in a German sanatorium at the age of twenty-eight.