Jersey Shore Magazine

j e r s e y s h o r e • S P R I N G 2 0 2 1 11 brother, William, and use the pro- ceeds to publish his first novel titled Maggie: A Girl of the Streets under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. Crane the Writer Crane lived the life of a bohe- mian in New York City for a time and composed his American classic novel The Red Badge of Courage while broke and living on the Lower East Side. His writing career led him to upstate New York, the American west, Pennsylvania's coal mine country, the Carolinas and Florida, the Caribbean, to Greece and Cuba, and then finally to the English countryside, where he settled with common-law wife, Cora Taylor Crane. There he wrote essays, short stories, poetry, and seven and a half other novels at a furious pace. "Even though he was a well-known novelist who socialized with a lot of the famous authors of his era, Crane continued to work as a war corre- spondent and journalist right up until his final days," Chesek explained. "But he actually preferred to be remembered as a poet and to call his works 'lines' rather than poems, since they pretty much dispensed with meter and rhyme, and really pointed the way toward the modern poetry of the twentieth century." No matter where Crane wrote, though, the Jersey Shore continued to inspire him. His short stories, "The Pace of Youth" and "The Reluctant Voyagers," along with his essays, "The Wreck of the New Era" and "Ghosts on the New Jersey Shore," were set in and around the Asbury Park area. The Arbutus Cottage The Arbutus Cottage would remain in the Crane family until 1900, when the last of the Crane relatives sold it shortly after Stephen's untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight in a sanitorium in Badenweiler, Germany. Throughout the Twentieth Century, the Fourth Avenue structure passed through a string of ownerships and a litany of identities, with the deed changing hands at least fifteen times before 1950. Owners included an attorney, a retired pastor, a grocer, a garage owner, a boarding house owner, a fertilizer salesman, and a bookie. The home itself survived a close call with a nearby fire, offered continued on page 12 Teen Crane. Although there are many photos of Stephen Crane taken at later points in his life, there exists only one photo of him that we can be sure was shot in Asbury Park. This portrait of Crane was taken at the downtown studio of photographer William Stauffer. Crane is dressed in the uniform of Claverack College, the mili- tary-style academy that he attended between January 1888 and spring 1890, which would make him somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old. Although he was away at school during the academic year, he returned each summer to his home in Asbury Park, which remained his official place of residence during this time period.

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