SOURCE: Monteiro, George. “Society and Nature in Stephen Crane's ‘The Men in the Storm’.” Prairie Schooner 45, no. 1 (spring 1971): 13-17.

In the following essay, Monteiro views the major thematic concerns of Stephen Crane's “The Men in the Storm” to be violence against man by nature and society.

Stephen Crane was a philosophical naturalist. This commonplace observation, so dear to the literary and cultural historian, is unfortunately less than accurate. For the truth is that at no time was Crane able to commit himself fully to the implications of the determinism he so much wanted to accept. The difficulty lay in his inability to resolve the conflict between his intellectual commitment to naturalism and his emotional tie to the nineteenth-century Protestantism of his family. If Crane could not embrace his ancestors' Methodism, with its strong emphasis on scriptural authority, neither could he free himself from its nagging influence. One of...