Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
A girl grows up in a New York tenement, is driven out by her family, and dies. Crane wrote the novella at twenty-one and published it himself because no publisher would take it, and the book's refusal to soften anything was new in American fiction.
The prose is impressionistic and sometimes clumsy, and the dialect is uneven. But the method, staying close to a character's sensations and refusing moral commentary, anticipates the modern American novel. It is short enough to read in an afternoon and bleak enough to stay for years.
Public-domain status
First published in 1893. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Stephen Crane died in 1900, so this work has been free to republish there since 1971.
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