"I go through the world unexplained," Stephen Crane once remarked, and so far that is still true. In the iconography of American literary history, he continues to be the archetypical boy artist whose untutored genius produced a few superb things before he was crushed by a society hostile to what it could not understand. It is an illusion, of course, but this is the picture of Stephen Crane that developed in his own time and prevails in ours. The essays in this book, published to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Crane's birth, allow Crane studies to reveal the transition of Stephen Crane from a legendary figure to a comprehendible author, a serious artist who drew from the tradition and contributed to it.