Picture of the Day: November 1

American writer Stephen Crane, born on November 1, 1871, is best remembered as the author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a realistic portrayal of one soldier’s Civil War battle experience. Crane’s novels and short stories, which were influenced by the French Naturalistic writers, showed individuals at the mercy of natural and social forces. In the early 1890s Crane became a freelance writer in the Bowery area of New York City and, resulting from his firsthand observation of poverty in the slums, he wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a book considered shocking at the time. Crane covered the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Spanish-American War in 1898 as a news correspondent. His later short-story collections, such as The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898), are recognized as masterpieces of the form. Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900 at the age of 28.