DOIAbstract
The influence of European painting and literature in Stephen Crane’s pre-Red Badge of Courage work has been overstated by most twentieth century critics. Stephen Crane’s portrayals of New York poverty in the 1890s was profoundly shaped by the more immediate influence of the American mass media, specifically by religious anti-slum tracts, the documentary photographs of Jacob Riis and Alfred Stieglitz, the “new” journalism that blurred the distinction between the newspaper and the novel, and color print advertising. Maggie: a Girl from the Streets and his freelance newspaper articles written between 1892 and 1894 provide ample evidence of Crane’s participation in the sensational mass media, which often transformed urban poverty into middle-c...