Number One Ranked
Stephen Crane Fan Site!
according to Google! We're very proud of this achievement.
Google's mysterious yet all-knowing system says we're
NUMBER ONE, better even than our arch-rivals in Crane
Worship: the so-called Stephen Crane Society! Wow!
Stephen Crane says:
Read my collected works
or I'm gonna kick the
shit out of you.
Listen nancy, we are some of the baddest Stephen Crane fans around.
We've been reading Crane and studying his life since we were 12 years old,
so if you don't know who Stephen Crane is, you'd better take your ass back
to the library and read The Red Badge of Courage.
This here fan site is a collection of random stuff that has caught the eye of
true Crane connoisseurs like us. Or us. Actually, just us. We didn't learn
about Crane in any fancy pants college, we learned about him on the streets,
prior to attending a fancy pants college!
Enjoy the site and remember, we're not the top ranked Stephen Crane Fan
Site for nothing! We've paid our dues and made our bones, and the motto
"Stephen Crane for Life" is tattooed on our hairy chests!
We own the domain name stephencrane.org, see? We bought it for cheap
and then tried to point it to this single page hosted on LitVision, the wonderful
literary e-zine.
Well, we tried the domain forward trick and got an error message. We emailed
Yahoo Tech Support, and they sent back a lame-o email telling us to call their
customer support line. No way brother! We're keeping Yahoo's minions right
where they belong, in the digital realm. Plus, we resent the fact that this
simple thing isn't working, and they can't explain it via a simple email. Screw
Yahoo! So, our passive resolution was to point the domain to LitVision's
frontpage, until we work up the rage to call these Yahoo bastards or email
them again and hope we don't get a slavering moron on the other end.
http://www.stephencrane.org/
We bought a mini-portrait of Stephen Crane made
by an artist named A. Kelly. It didn't cost much and
we really like it. Only questions a Stephen Crane
nerdy might have:
1) Does it look enough like Crane to be called
anything but a "stylized" portrait? We don't quite
know, but a good guess is this looks most like
Crane shortly before he DIED of consumption!
2) We've also got problems with this because it
looks like a caricature of Crane that another artist
did, so we're wondering how original A. Kelly's
concept is?? Oh well, we still love it!
This is Crane's signature which
is owned by us, the top ranked
Stephen Crane Fan Site.
It was expensive but a good
deal, and we bought it from a
dealer with a rock-solid
reputation.
Many men died so that we
could obtain this signature,
and share it with you today.
(We can't decipher who did
the illustration of Crane, so if
anyone does know, contact us).
At right is a copy of Crane's first
book, which he published himself
under the name Johnston Smith.
This is probably our favorite longer
Crane fiction, overall. The image at
right is a cover from the first edition.
We don't own it, we just thought it'd
be worlds of fun to include it on this
page. We don't collect Crane editions
anyway, although we did buy an old
copy of The Red Badge of Courage
that (we later found out) had antique
mouse turds all up in the spine! We
removed the turds, but goddamn if
we can't pick up that book without
thinking of them falling all over us.
This is a Stephen Crane letter
that was auctioned recently.
Photo of correspondents
Richard Harding Davis (left) and
Stephen Crane during the
Spanish American War. They
were the two hotshots of their
time, and while Harding Davis
has much love from the Top
Ranked Stephen Crane Fan Site,
Crane always had the edge and
Harding Davis knew it!
Above we find a young Stephen Crane nestled between the hungry
glares of writers Hamlin Garland (left) and Willie Dean Howells (right).
While Crane had more talent than either writer, they were the literary
pimps of their day, and helped Crane get his reputation as a writer
established. For that we're ever grateful, as since Crane died so young,
he didn't have time to languish in obscurity. Mr. Garland and Mr.
Howells each have their own Society that worships them as gods,
which is especially understandable given their great moustaches.
At left is a photo of Stephen Crane's
eventual commonlaw wife, Cora
Stewart-Taylor-Crane. They met in a
Jacksonville brothel in 1896 and stayed
together the rest of Crane's life. Cora
might have had something of a shady
past, but we at the Top Ranked Stephen
Crane Fan Site approve of her. She was a
loyal partner who stuck by Crane when he
was broke and sickly during the last years
of his life. After he died, she kept his
papers in pretty good order.
Cora, writing as Imogene Carter, was one
of the first female war correspondents.
She was also pretty damn hot.
Wertheim and Sorrentino
We'd like to give a shout-out to two of the
top-ranked Crane experts in the country:
Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino.
Sorrentino puts out the Stephen Crane
Studies journals, and Wertheim's many
scholarly books on Crane include the Crane
Encyclopedia at left. This is a great book
and some stores sell it really high, but you
can find it for as little as 99 cent on Ebay.
These two guys are down with the posh
Stephen Crane Society, but maybe one day
they'll defect to our side.
Drunk On Something!!
Wertheim and Sorrentino helped give a
smackdown to the credibility of Thomas
Beer, who wrote a biography of Crane's life
in the early 1920's.
Turns out, Mr. Beer was making shit up off
the top of his head: quoting from letters
that didn't exist and inventing entire
scenarios involving Crane.
While Beer was a fraud, his tall tales did
help revive interest in Crane's life and
works. If only Beer would have done
proper research, he'd have found out that
Crane's life was so interesting, there was no
need to embellish or make stuff up!
of the Top Ranked Stephen
Crane Fan Site Fan Club, aka
The Stephen Crane Crusaders!
It's no surprise that you would want to join
us. We are the hottest group of Crane fans
out there. Others may seem more powerful
or smarter than we are, but it's just a matter
of time before we outstripe their pathetic
Crane worship. Yeah that's right, they know
who we are, and they can't stop us.
To join, you need to email us explaining why
you are the baddest Stephen Crane Fan on
your block, and what you have done and are
going to do to make sure Crane is the most
revered dead author ever!
Email to: crane@litvision.org
>Coming Soon
as we get time, energy, and a plan:
We're gonna load up this site with our thoughts,
questions, impressions etc. of Crane's writing. This is
going to be an anti-academic site, because impressions are
fun and Crane relied heavily upon them.
>Stephen Crane links
(because even though we is the Number One Ranked
Stephen Crane Fansite, there are some sites who have
more actual content than we do at this point)...
link: Stephen Crane Society
link: A great Jacksonville Florida site with mucho info on
Cora Crane.
link: Interesting comments from Paul Sorrentino, a cool
Crane scholar
link: A good number of Crane's stories can be read on this
person's site.
>Contact a fellow Stephen
Crane junkie:
In case a living soul stumbles across this jewel of internet
technology and literary Garden of Eden, ya can email me,
Patrick Simonelli, at crane@litvision.org
>Thanks!!