Stephen Crane lived fast and aggressively, and although he died at age twenty-eight, he managed to exceed a normal lifetime's experience in travel and exposure to extremes of human condition and endeavor. Out of his experience came a body of work equal in extent and quality to that of many longer-lived contemporaries. Crane produced one novel and a handful of short stories which are securely in place among the masterworks of fiction in English. Perhaps due to the unique character of his genius, the relationship between his hectic life and his best art is even more problematical than is usually the case with writers. He produced the greatest of American war novels before he ever saw combat, but perhaps his best short story came directly out of his experience in an endangered lifeboat. Another of his masterpieces seems to have developed from a single visual impression, caught at...