Maggie is set in the New York slums of the Bowery in the late 1890s. I still love the book, even though I am older and presumably wiser than when I first read it years ago.

It may be due to the intense, sincere character of this book, obviously the product of a young, rebellious man. It is difficult to understand why this is the case, other than perhaps the subject matter, but there have always been readers who also thought this way. I have always cared more about 'Maggie' than about the 'Red Badge of Courage'. Some famous writers, including William Dean Howells praised 'Maggie' enthusiastically, but for the most part the book was indifferently received. I have read Steven Crane's short novel, 'Maggie: A Girl of the Streets' many times over the years and returned to read it again recently together with Crane's more famous book, 'The Red Badge of Courage.' Crane wrote 'Maggie' in 1891 at the age of 21 and published the book at his own expense in 1893 under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. But this collection of stories demonstrates that revisiting some of these classroom terrors can one day make for an unexpectedly pleasurable experience. It's not as if Crane wrote for an audience of 15 year-olds. Went on and read the other stories in the collection as well, some of which were quite interesting though not especially exhilarating ('The Monster', 'The Blue Hotel'), some little more than amusing ('The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky'), and one being clearly the best of the bunch, the much-anthologized 'The Open Boat,' which was far more moving to me when I read it today than it ever was reading it in class.ĭon't really know why high schoolers are forced to read 'classic' lit that fails to be relevant to them seems that quickly snuffs out a general interest in reading later in life, which leads to today's miserable statistics regarding the tiny percentage of adults actually reading books these days (while, presumably, a large percentage of the rest await their orders from Oprah).

So, every detail that bored me as a kid fascinated me last week as I reread it.

My growing interest in that time period in general also made it better reading than the first time around, as I better understood the story's context (try Jacob Riis's collection of photographs How the Other Half Lives for some of that). Final lines of the story land like a punch to the jaw I suspect I missed the conclusion's brutal cynicism when reading it as a teenager. Couldn't appreciate 'Maggie.' much when it was assigned reading in high school, but returning to it later in life I was pretty enthralled.

Maggie by stephen crane