In your issue of Oct. 17, an essay by Alli Greco about Stephen Crane’s novella Maggie helps readers understand this painful story in the context of American urban development in the late nineteenth century. News-Letter readers might be interested to know that we have a world-class collection of rare Stephen Crane material right here at JHU — letters, magazines and first editions, including a first edition of Maggie from 1893. The story that Greco glosses was considered too scandalous for public consumption, and Crane could not get it published. So he paid an unknown printer about $700 (a huge sum at the time) for several hundred copies, which he attempted (unsuccessfully) to distribute himself. After Crane became famous for his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie was republished by a traditional publisher — but with significant changes to make it more palatable to the average American reader. The 1893 copies which he could not give away are now extremely rare.
Our collection was featured in an exhibition at the Peabody Library this past spring, “For Love or Money: Art, Commerce, and Stephen Crane—Works from the Wertheim-Frary Collection.” Students in a class I taught about Crane and his peers also blogged about Maggie and other works by Crane at http://americansondisplay.wordpress.com/. News-Letter readers interested in the collection should feel free to contact me for more information.
-Gabrielle Dean, Curator of Literary Rare Books and Manuscripts for The Sheridan Libraries
