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From suburbia and skyscraper scrawl to the open prairies and 'local color', slum life to rural idyll: reprinting American and British literary classics.

The Open Boat
Stephen Crane

£1.50

This story was based on Crane’s own experience in early 1897; it was published in Scribner’s Magazine later that same year. Crane, sailing to Cuba, was shipwrecked and sailed to shore on a small boat with two other men, one of whom drowned when their boat capsized. H. G. Wells assessed it to be “beyond all doubt” the crown of Crane’s oeuvre, which included The Badge of Red Courage, the most famous novel of the American Civil War. Crane died when only 28.

SANDSPOUT SHORT STORIES : 06
C6 format paperback (114mm x 162mm)
46pp

Biography

STEPHEN CRANE (1871 – 1900) is regarded now as one of the most original writers of his generation; he was a poet, novelist and short story writer. He taught himself to read before he was four, although he did not excel as a student; he declared college to be a “waste of time'” and left to become a writer. He was attracted to slum life, whose characters he found to be “open and plain, with nothing hidden.” His first novel, Maggie was self-published, and was about a prostitute. (His reputation was ruined later by his involvement and mishap in the arrest of an alleged prostitute.) The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, was the result of an obsession with war. His intention was to write a “psychological portrayal of fear,” and it met much success. He settled in England where he befriended Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and others. Poverty and ill health (he suffered several severe pulmonary hemorrhages) led to a premature death.

Published in 1895, The Red Badge of Courage is noted for its realism and naturalism. He used press reports and even interviewed military veterans for inspiration, and is in a sense displaced reportage. It was received by near-universal acclaim, what H. G. Wells called an “orgy of praise.” It is considered now to be a landmark of the American literary canon.

Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin books, was a man who liked to be seen riding a virtuous horse though his spurs were as sharp as an abacus: money was his game and he chanced to sell his new Penguin range through his Penguincubator in 1937, in tobacconists alongside newspapers and boiled sweets, also a few placed as concessions in branches of F. W. Woolworth’s. One Penguincubator was commissioned at Charing Cross Station, placed next to a machine vending cigarettes. (6d the price of a packet of fags, 6d the price of the first Penguins, though am not sure if Lane had thought through how you were supposed to keep the books alight without a filter.) Booksellers in the Charing Cross locality objected to the Penguincubator and it was removed. It would seem that they were never successful in any case.

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