Black as black can be

The ruthless rhymes for heartless homes appeared in England. That book lay the foundation for the British school of thought called the black humour. Curiously enough, that same year, 1899, a somewhat similar book was published on the other side of the ocean. The author's name was Steven Crane (1871—1900).

He saw life as hard, even ruthless. Most of the writing that he published during his short life was mostly dealing with the poor and degraded. His style was called realistic, naturalistic, and impressionistic, which is quite in accordance with the beliefs of the day.

His childhood was happy and conventional. His father was a Methodist minister, and the family was a large and happy one. As Crane grew up, he found his parents' religion irrelevant to the hard life he saw, and he indulged in many of the things they had forbidden (partly due to Steven's poor health). One of the forbidden pleasures was baseball, a sport at which Crane excelled. He might even become a professional athlete. Yet he was urged to go to university. In 1891, though, he left school, preferring to study humanity, he said, and became a reporter on the newspaper for which his brother worked.

However, when he wrote too sympathetically about a workers' strike, both he and his brother lost their jobs. He began to write novels. His second one, The Red Badge of Courage, was an immediate success, and Crane became a celebrity. Perhaps, his experiences during the two wars, the Greco-Turkish and the Spanish-American, gave Crane the inspiration to write a book of poetry entitled, ironically, War Is Kind (1899). In fact, it was throughout his entire short life that Crane was writing poetry, which he felt gave a fuller picture of his philosophy (Text 81).