Stephen Crane was an American novelist, poet and journalist. The eighth surviving child of highly devout parents—his father was a Methodist minister and his mother a leading member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union—Crane was mostly raised by his older siblings in various parts of New Jersey. After attending Claverack College, Lafayette College, and Syracuse University, he left schooling behind and traveled to New York to work as a reporter of slum life.

Today he is considered one of the finest American writers of the 1890s and among the most innovative of the literary realists.