Last Words: Stephen Crane's Final Works Book

Earlier I reviewed the title story (see below) before I had finished reading the entire collection. Now I have finished the eight stories and can say that the title story was a great indicator of the great pleasure that I would derive in reading the rest of the collection.
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I didn't rate this book of short stories because I just finished the second one, which happens to be the title story, "The Wide Net." It is about a young man who becomes angry with his pregnant wife and decides to go on an all-night toot. At least, that is what it ended up being. The next morning when he returns home his wife is not there.

"Then when he got back to the front room he saw she had left him a little letter in an envelope. That was doing something behind someone's back. He took out the letter, pushed it open, held it out at a distance from his eyes.... After one look he was scared to read the exact words, and he crushed the whole thing in his hand instantly, but what it had said was that she would not put up with him after that and was going to the river to drown herself.

"'Drown herself ... But she's in mortal fear of the water!'"

The young husband then begins to gather a group of people to help him drag the Pearl River for his wife. "The Wide Net" refers to one owned by a local doctor and since it is the widest possessed by anyone in the area, it is borrowed for the task.

Eudora Welty could write funny and she could write sad and sometimes she wrote both in the same story. Is "The Wide Net" comedy? or tragedy? or both? Not going to tell. However, here is an example of the lyricism of the word pictures with which she paints the landscape:

"In Dover it had rained, and the town looked somehow like new. The wavy heat of late afternoon came down from the watertank and fell over everything like shiny mosquito-netting. At the wide place where the road was paved and patched with tar, it seemed newly embedded with Coca-Cola tops. The old circus posters on the store were newly gone, only bits, the snowflakes of white horses, clinging to its side. Morning-glory vines started almost visibly to grow over the roofs and cling round the ties of the railroad track, where bluejays lighted on the rails, and umbrella chinaberry trees hung heavily over the whole town, dripping intermittently upon the tin roofs."