SOURCE: Going, William T. “William Higgins and Crane's ‘The Open Boat’: A Note about Fact and Fiction.” Papers on English Language & Literature 1, no. 1 (winter 1963): 79-82.

In the following essay, Going traces the treatment of William Higgins's death in newspaper accounts and in “The Open Boat.”

Stephen Crane's “The Open Boat” is, according to its subtitle, “A Tale Intended to Be after the Fact. Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer ‘Commodore.’” The story begins at the very point where Crane ends his journalistic account for the New York Press (January 7, 1897): “The history of life in an open boat for thirty hours would no doubt be instructive for the young, but none is to be told here now.” The next year, however, Crane did publish that “history.” And since the references in the story like “seven turned faces, and later a stump of a top-most mast...