Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings Book

This is my first experience with Crane and I was pleasantly surprised. His writing is imbued with what appears now as a fresh-faced, never terribly stark, realism and a playful hilarity that underscores the banal Bowery life of the 1890s. Crane lived there as a young man briefly and his observations on and fictionalizing of the weird panoply of characters and events he must've based these stories off of never gets old. I'm reminded particularly of the urban lilt of Zola, of fictions that cut to the nitty-gritty and woo and inspire. Life then, as now, was shitty and Crane shines best when he's describing to us a fire on a narrow street, homeless men in a line in a blizzard waiting for the soup kitchen to open or, as in the title story, a neglected and desperate young woman seeks succor in the "successful" friend of her brother.