SOURCE: Benfey, Christopher. “Shipwrecks.” Pequod 32 (1991): 134-45.

In the following essay, Benfey traces Crane's interest in shipwrecks, which culminated in his personal experience on the Commodore and his story “The Open Boat.”

Throughout the Dora Clark affair, Stephen Crane had portrayed himself as a man to whom things happen. The “reluctant witness” was willing to testify, but his testimony revealed little of his effort to be where things were likely to happen, and nothing at all of his complicity in prolonging events once they had occurred. Crane's journalism allowed him to educate himself in the phenomenology of disaster—fires, murders, mining accidents, shipwrecks. When he found himself in the midst of such events, he was prepared to make the most of them. Three months after the Dora Clark affair had run its course, Crane plunged into another highly visible and ambiguous episode, and again he found it professionally useful...