Flowers of Asphalt is an unfinished novel attributed to American writer Stephen Crane. The novel, said to have been started in 1894, was to be about a male prostitute. No trace of the manuscript has ever been found. [1]
Flowers of Asphalt is an unfinished novel attributed to American writer Stephen Crane. The novel, said to have been started in 1894, was to be about a male prostitute. No trace of the manuscript has ever been found. [1]
The genesis of the novel is reported in a document found among the papers of Crane biographer Thomas Beer. The document is an unsigned letter that Crane biographer John Berryman attributed to James Huneker, an older acquaintance of Crane's. The letter reads:
One night in April or May of 1894, I ran into Crane on Broadway and we started over to the Everett House together, I'd been at a theater with Saltus and was in evening dress. In the Square a kid came up and begged from us. I was drunk enough to give him a quarter. He followed along and I saw he was really soliciting. Crane was damned innocent about everything but women and didn't see what the boy's game was. We got to the Everett House and we could see that the kid was painted. He was very handsome—looked like a Rossetti angel—big violet eyes—probably full of belladonna. He took the kid in and fed him supper. Got him to talk. The kid had syphilis, of course—most of that type do—and wanted money to have himself treated. Crane rang up Irving Bacheller and borrowed fifty dollars.
He pumped a mass of details out of the boy whose name was something like Coolan and began a novel about a boy prostitute. I made him read À Rebours which he didn't like very much. Thought it stilted. This novel began with a scene in a railroad station. Probably the best passage of prose that Crane ever wrote. Boy from the country running off to see New York. He read the thing to Garland who was horrified and begged him to stop. I don't know that he ever finished the book. He was going to call it Flowers of Asphalt. [2]
Whether Crane actually began Flowers of Asphalt remains an open question. Acknowledging that its attestation is not the greatest, Berryman noted that the projected theme was in line with the themes of other Crane works, including Maggie: A Girl of the Streets , George's Mother and to a lesser degree The Red Badge of Courage : "the movement in youth from innocence to experience, seen as degradation." He further cited a letter that Crane sent to Hamlin Garland in June 1894 in which Crane reported he was working on a new novel, a letter Huneker could not have known about. The relationship between Garland and Crane deteriorated and Berryman suggested that it could have been as a consequence of how disturbing Garland found the excerpt of Flowers of Asphalt Crane supposedly read to him and Crane's resentment at following Garland's advice to abandon it. Finally, the purported title, the report of Crane's opinion of À rebours and the railway station setting led him to conclude that the account was genuine. [3]
Writer and critic Samuel R. Delany cast doubt on the veracity of the Huneker letter, noting that it is unsigned and not written in Huneker's usual style, lacking any salutation. Delany allowed for the possibility that Huneker simply wrote the letter quickly or that Beer reconstructed the information from a recollection of an earlier discussion with Huneker. However, Beer's known propensity for fabricating information about Crane makes accepting the passage as factual problematic. Delany speculated that Beer, who was gay, might have created the letter as a way of introducing the idea that Crane was gay or bisexual. [4]
Crane scholar Stanley Wertheim found the account improbable. Crane was impoverished in 1894 and had not yet met Bacheller, making it unlikely that Crane could have borrowed as large a sum as $50 (equivalent to about $1,800 in modern terms) to give to a stranger. [5] He noted that Huneker told writer Vincent Starrett that Crane had started a book called Flowers in Asphalt in October 1898, but at that time Crane was in Havana and was "no longer innocent about New York street life". [6]
Avant-garde filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos took the title of his 1951 film Flowers of Asphalt from the Crane novel. [7]
Stephen Crane was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation.
The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by American author Stephen Crane. The novel was published on 3 October 1895. Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound, a "red badge of courage", to counteract his cowardice. When his regiment once again faces the enemy, Henry acts as flag-bearer, carrying the regimental colors.
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Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. It is number 33 on the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction list.
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Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976) is a science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It was nominated for the 1976 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and was shortlisted for a retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1995. It was originally published under the shorter title Triton.
Hogg is a novel by American author Samuel R. Delany, written in 1969 and completed in 1995. The novel deals graphically with themes of murder, child molestation, incest, coprophilia, coprophagia, urolagnia, anal-oral contact, necrophilia and rape. It was conceptualized and written in 1969, with a further draft completed in 1973, and it was finally published with some further, though relatively minor, rewrites in 1995 by Black Ice Books. Two later editions have featured some corrections, the last of which, published by Fiction Collective Two in 2004, carries a note from Delany stating that it is definitive.
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John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His 77 Dream Songs (1964) won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Addison Irving Bacheller was an American journalist and writer. He founded the first modern newspaper syndicate in the United States.
James Gibbons Huneker was an American art, book, music, and theater critic. A colorful individual and an ambitious writer, he was "an American with a great mission," in the words of his friend, the critic Benjamin De Casseres, and that mission was to educate Americans about the best cultural achievements, native and European, of his time. From 1892 to 1899, he was the husband of the sculptor Clio Hinton.
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The following is a list of works by American author Stephen Crane.
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Thomas Beer was an American biographer, novelist, essayist, satirist, and author of short fiction.
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Jean Marie Constantin Joseph "Jan" van Beers was a Belgian painter and illustrator, the son of the poet Jan van Beers. They are sometimes referred to as Jan van Beers the elder and Jan van Beers the younger. In 1884, Jan Van Beers produced the pen-and-ink sketches for the edition de luxe of his father's poetry.
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