Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York by Stephen Crane

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York Reviews

• 
  Theo Logos

  Stephen Crane wrote Maggie, A Girl of the Streets when he was just twenty-two. Eschewing all romanticism and sentimentality, he produced a masterpiece of American Naturalism, brutal and brilliant. Unfortunately, his hard look at the hypocrisy and squalor of the city , and his absolute refusal to soften his story with any hint of redemption or happy ending proved too grim for contemporary audiences. Maggie established Crane as a writer’s writer - usually more appreciated by others of his craft than by the paying public.
  
  Maggie is the first novella in the collection. The story opens, and the mood is set with young Jimmy, (Maggie’s older brother) in a brutal street fight against other Bowery children. From this opening, we meet Jimmy’s family, the Johnsons; contemptible, drunken father, imperious, drunken mother, doomed baby Tommy, and Maggie herself. Maggie begins strangely untouched by the nasty chaos around her, and dreams of escaping it. Unfortunately, she has neither the imagination nor the support to know how to do this effectively. There in lies the squalid tragedy. Crane’s skillful use of Impressionism, revealing the inner lives and thoughts of his characters, keep the tale from veering into melodrama. Five Stars
  
  George’s Mother is the other novella length piece in this collection, and it is a direct companion to Maggie. George and his mother live in the same Bowery tenement as the Johnsons. Unlike Maggie’s monstrous, drunken mother, George’s mother is a pious, good women, a member of the Temperance Union, and frequenter of prayer meetings. She treats her son with loving devotion rather than the blows and curses Mrs. Johnson rains on her poor offsprings. Their story remains a brutal little tragedy just the same; the Bowery was not a place for happy endings. Four Stars
  
  Besides the two novellas, three other pieces from the collection were notable. First, are two related short stories:
  An Ominous Baby, and A Dark-Brown Dog. The protagonist of both stories is the doomed baby Tommy, Maggie’s younger brother who dies early in that tale. In these two stories we get a glimpse of baby Tommy and his amusements and trials as a shockingly neglected toddler. Four Stars
  
  Finally, there is a short piece of Crane’s journalism. He was covering an important New York election where the corrupted Tammany Machine was being thrown out en mass. His technique was to take to the streets, talk to the revelers, and take down their replies verbatim. The resulting jubilant expressions of victorious voters is a mini time machine back to the streets of 1890s New York City. Five Stars
• 
  Shari

  One thing a reader would instantly see in Crane's works is the vividness of his prose. Maggie is, without doubt, one of the most intensely animated writings I have ever read, classic or modern. The setting is so overpoweringly real and natural that reading just the first three chapters easily transported me into a place so poor and deprived that my heart just went out for Maggie and Jimmie as if they were real children. What is missing in the narrative, however, is the depth of characterization. It is not clear how Maggie, and Jimmie, has been affected psychologically and emotionally by her environment. Is she really a "bad" child/person? What are her motives for running away? Is she really in love with Pete? Maggie is definitely overwhelmed by Pete's "magnificence", but her actions and thoughts barely go beyond this impression. What are her greatest fears? Her dream? These are missing. Nothing is also said about how she actually meets her fate at the end of the story. In the process, the story didn't read complete. I actually felt disappointed when I reached the last chapter.
• 
  Rex Hurst

  This was originally a self-published novella by Stephen Crane from 1893. It flopped, but after his novel, The Red Badge of Courage, hit it big, Maggie was republished - (after significant changes were made) 1896 and became the semi-classic it is today. That is, a great story which no one has ever heard of. An amazing amount of material is covered in such a short span of work. In fact, the life of an entire girl from the Bowery.
  
  For those who don't know the Bowery was a neighborhood in the south of Manhattan, well known for slums, vice, crippling poverty, violence, and crime- at least at the time of this writing. The protagonist grows up in a chaotic situation, surrounded by her violent and dangerously alcoholic family. Her parents routinely become drunk, beat on their children, and destroy their apartment. Attempting to escape this insanity, Maggie latches onto a local bartender, who she perceives as the knight in shining armor, while it is as plain as day to the reader he is nothing more than a dumb thug with a high opinion of himself.
  
  While Crane’s characters speak in the vernacular of their society, similar to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Walker’s The Color Purple, the book discusses underlying themes that pester every level of mankind. Substance abuse and hypocrisy being chief among them - most of the characters here are the dregs of society, thus they are constantly looking for someone else to look down upon, and if a victim doesn’t present himself then they manufacture one. But this novella also takes a large swipe at the naturalistic principle, a topic of much discussion at the time of first publication.
  
  Naturalism is when “a character is set into a world where there is no escape from one's biological heredity. Additionally, the circumstances in which a person finds oneself will dominate one's behavior, depriving the individual of personal responsibility.” In this case, Maggie, both sheltered from any other life and abused by current situations, cannot get away from the lousy hand dealt her and must suffer accordingly.
• 
  J.M. Hushour

  This is my first experience with Crane and I was pleasantly surprised. His writing is imbued with what appears now as a fresh-faced, never terribly stark, realism and a playful hilarity that underscores the banal Bowery life of the 1890s. Crane lived there as a young man briefly and his observations on and fictionalizing of the weird panoply of characters and events he must've based these stories off of never gets old. I'm reminded particularly of the urban lilt of Zola, of fictions that cut to the nitty-gritty and woo and inspire. Life then, as now, was shitty and Crane shines best when he's describing to us a fire on a narrow street, homeless men in a line in a blizzard waiting for the soup kitchen to open or, as in the title story, a neglected and desperate young woman seeks succor in the "successful" friend of her brother.
• 
  Matthew Huff

  I wonder if this work would be more powerful as a full novel; the sheer beauty and impression of his style, however, warrants the fourth star.
• 
  Matt

  Have never really read any Stephen Crane before, and plan on doing a deep dive on him before tackling that new Auster biography.
• 
  Inès

  rip dickens you would've loved it
• 
  Russell Bittner

  I must confess, I come to this review with a heavy heart. I’ve wanted to read Maggie: A Girl of the Streets for years — and have had this edition on my bookshelves for as long. Moreover, once I finally read a bit about Crane’s background and early death (at the age of 29), I wanted to read — and appreciate — it even more.
  
  Perhaps I err. Perhaps I just don’t get it. Perhaps Crane’s naturalism is simply over my head—even if Emile Zola’s never was. If so, I apologize — and you can disregard this review.
  
  I read Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I read "The Monster"…"The Blue Hotel"…"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"…"The Open Boat." And I just don’t get all of the applause.
  
  For starters, I found Crane’s transcription of his characters’ Irish Brogue (if that’s what it was) in Maggie virtually unreadable — at the very least, annoying. In this, I’ll take my cue from Erskine Caldwell who insisted that the rhythm of a given character’s speech should be sufficient to convey to the reader a sense of ‘foreignness’ — rather than resorting to a perversion of every last syllable, to dropping consonants, and to repeating senseless phrases. In any case, I feel that less is more — and Crane had too much of ‘more’ and too little of ‘less.’
  
  Add to that, Crane’s odd ear for adverbs. As Twain once famously said (in order to dissuade the use of them entirely), “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” I give you three — all from "The Blue Hotel" — from among the dozens I found in this collection of short stories and novellas (the italics are mine for emphasis):
  
  (from p. 138) “The cowboy, Scully and the Easterner burst into a cheer that was like a chorus of triumphant soldiery, but before its conclusion the Swede had scuffled agilely to his feet and come in berserk abandon at his foe.”
  
  (from p. 145) “The Swede had grasped the gambler frenziedly at the throat, and was dragging him from his chair.”
  
  (from p. 147) “’Johnnie,’ said the cowboy blankly. There was a moment of silence, and then he said robustly: “Why, no. The game was only for fun.”
  
  If I’m being too captious in citing these examples, I beg your forgiveness — and ask that you read the stories yourself, then pass judgment on me rather than on Crane.
  
  In any case, I will certainly read The Red Badge of Courage before I form any definitive opinion of this author’s writing. That’s the very least I can render to a man of Crane’s reputation.
  
  RRB
  07/30/13
  Brooklyn, NY
  
• 
  Joshua Emil

  I bought this book on my birthday. And started reading it on Halloween. Unfortunately, it remained in my bag or shelf untouched for a couple of months. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets has a gritty depiction of life in a growing New York City in the late 1890's. Along with Maggie, there are some Tales of New York. The tales of "The Broken Down Van", "An Experiment in Misery", "An Experiment in Luxury" and "The Adventures of a Novelist" somehow didn't make any sense to me and the rest did. I didn't read "George's Mother" because of two reasons. First, it's a long time and I need to move on to other books. Second, it's going to be another Maggie. What made me to stay on and read of what's left is the realism and the colorful tales of New York City before it became the city we know today.
• 
  Lauren Contreras-Loreto

  This is a short and rather tragic story about a girl named Maggie who lives in a very poor part of town. The story considers the small change in people's lives that she makes, and the even smaller change after her death. Rather depressing.
• 
  Caleb

  I read this on a whim when it showed up in a lot of other books. The idea of Maggie initially intrigued me, especially when hearing about how vulgar it was for the time, and how it got some bad press because of it. In retrospect, I can definitely see where it would get that reputation, and for the time, it's well deserved. The insinuations about Maggie, and some other characters besides, were not what I had expected going in, and in the end, I really felt bad for her as a character. She just got in with the wrong crowd and it didn't go well. The rest of the cast though, I could really care less about. Most of them are scum, or so self-serving that they may as well be scum. This story is the only reason I'm not rating this book as a whole 1 star though. It's a decent read and intriguing for it's place in history.
  
  George's Mother, on the other hand, just sucks. I get that it's a morality thing trying to show the evils of drinking, and that makes some sense for the time with the various temperance movements that were starting to spring up. That doesn't make this compelling reading though. His mother is an annoying character, no matter how well she means, and George just reminds me of one of my idiot friends from years ago who treated his mother just as poorly, also being a bit of a spoiled brat. That's the best way I can describe George, in fact. He's spoiled and very unlikable. For such a short story, it was honestly a bit of a slog trying to get through it.
  
  The various short stories were overall just very meh to me. After George's Mother, I didn't have a lot of interest in reading them and just kinda skimmed my way through the rest of the book, trying to get it over with so I can get on to something more interesting.
• 
  Nina Foster

  The story about Maggie was “ok”, but I didn’t like or understand how it ended so abruptly and went into some other story about someone named George. I was interested in “Maggie’s” story, and the author didn’t even follow it through. We learned nothing of how she died, just that someone showed up at her mother’s and said she was dead. The mother cried and that was the end. Maggie was sad, jilted by a boyfriend, out on the streets then died. There was no elaboration of her life while she was out on the streets. Very poorly written.
• 
  Saleh MoonWalker

  Onvan : Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Tales of New York - Nevisande : Stephen Crane - ISBN : 0140437975 - ISBN13 : 9780140437973 - Dar 272 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 1893
• 
  Jeni Enjaian

  As I say with most of my reviews of any book that falls into the "classics" category, I find it very difficult to review these books, many times because I do not understand how the works came to be classified as classics. In the case of this particular book, the latter reason does not apply. That being said, I have three fairly negative criticisms and just one positive to give for this book.
  First the positive. Crane's narrative throughout all the various short stories is vivid and highly realistic. I could easily visualize the images Crane created on the page. Now for the negative. One, I am not a fan of writing dialect into the text. In many cases, especially that of American southern slaves, this dialect impedes the flow of the narrative because the reader is forced to slow the pace of their reading, sometimes stop altogether, to make out the meaning of the statements of various characters. Two, while Crane uses vivd imagery, he avoids giving the mundane details that root a narrative to a sensible framework. This causes some confusion for the reader because the narrative jumps from vivid image to vivid image without proper connection between the two. Three, short stories are not my favorite genre. This speaks nothing to Crane's talent as an author or strength of the stories themselves. It is simply personal taste.
  
  I would recommend this book to those interested in reading the classics. Despite most of what i said above, this is one of the better classics I've read recently.
• 
  Dusty

  I've known Stephen Crane was a sterling, profound writer, and I've read The Red Badge of Courage twice. However, this is the first time I've explored the gold encasing that crown jewel in Crane's short but curiously prolific literary career. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is a first-rate story: It's crisp and unexpected, hilarious and human, and its chapter-length vignettes bring to vivid life exactly the scenes of poverty and complex negotiations of personal morality and responsibility that Jacob A. Riis had dealt with far more drily in How the Other Half Lives. What perplexes other reviewers, I think, is the humor in Crane's denunciations of the double-standard to which women (and their virtue) are held; if you read all the character's thoughts as the author's own (which is rarely the case in any book), of course you'll mistake Crane for the vilest of chauvinists. George's Mother, a novella you don't hear much about, and a few of the other stories collected here tell parallel stories about Maggie's tenement community. Of the shorter works, my favorite is "The Men in the Storm" (1894), a story whose protagonist is the nameless mob of poor men who throng the doors of a charity house in the bitter cold of a snowy winter afternoon. The whole collection is essential reading: Five stars.
• 
  Lauren

  [Maggie, a Girl of the Streets; An Experiment in Misery; When a Man Falls a Crowd Gathers]
  
  I loved Crane's writing. His eloquence juxtaposed perfectly against the vernacular of the late 19th century New York City slums. He captured the daily life of the the people, many immigrants, and gave the reader a deeper look into the lives and thoughts of the lower/working class during the turn of the century. The stories themselves were not fantastic and I mean that in the sense of plot because these stories were told in a tone of realism and naturalism, unconcerned with embellishing or excitement. Really, Crane's writing is what kept my attention throughout his short stories. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in a true depiction of American life in turn of the century New York and one of the first examples of a writing style that sough to truly capture the American-immigrant experience.
• 
  Chris

  Picked this up in a second-hand bookstore and thought I would give it a try. Glad I did. It is spectacular. Beautifaul language that really sets the tone, though dreary, of turn-of-the-century America. Many people complain about the dialogue which takes some effort to get through as it is the genuine article, the language of the day which is an Irish/New York slang of the period. The works in this book all have a moralistic tone that does not always travel well with us today. Plus the reader has to make some leaps of faith regarding the fate of characters because the subject matter was taboo for the time. Crane is sometimes writing in code. However, it is his writing that is unbelievable. So beautiful and original. It really paints a picture and that's why I highly recommend this book.
• 
  Tom

  A very moving story of a young girl constrained by her setting in society. It took time to get into the rhythm of the language, but once I did, it help give an 'I was there' feeling to the writing.
  
  This edition included a number of other stories and essays by Crane. The second one "George's Mother" was just as good. While it was about his mother, it was about him also... "Upon reflection, he saw, therefore, that he was perfectly willing to be virtuous if somebody would come and make it easy for him."
  
  Some are not as sad as these first two... "New York's Bicycle Speedway" was observations on city life and was quite humorous. Overall, Crane has a great way of capturing the feeling of a crowd or society's activities.
• 
  Rachel

  This novel has vivid imagery and profound diction. The way in which Crane shapes the meaning of this story through his Impressionist-like writing is beautiful. Even the dialect adds to the flavor of the story. It is also interesting to note how Crane makes the point that entertaining Romantic thoughts and holding onto Romantic ideals is deadly. (This is the way in which he makes a case for Realism/Naturalism instead of Romanticism.) It can be argued that Maggie's death is the result of her inability to live in the real world, Realism, instead of the imaginary world, Romanticism. Coupled with this is the fact that she can't adapt to her surrondings, and she allows herself to be a victim of her environment.
• 
  Athena

  I had to read this book at school (with much regret) but we read it. It is a classic and classics are totally NOT my style. But when i finished i was like wow. It takes place in the lower east side of new york, i place i vist often. It is sad and it shows you the hardships of the main character maggie.
  
  Weither classics are your favorite genre or its mystery, paranormal-romance(like me), or dystopian fiction, you should read it.
• 
  Noreen

  
  I was curious about this novel after reading Hotel de Dream by Edmund White. White imagines the last days of Stephen Crane and invents a version of his rumored last novel, The Painted Boy, a manuscript Crane burned before his death.
  
  Maggie was Crane's first book and I'm finding I much prefer it to Red Badge of Courage.
• 
  Tim O'Leary

  *Removing previously posted additional half-star. Dialogue is just so repetitively moronic; overly-affected as ignorant. Even for the Irish class (or lack of it) at that time. Oxymoron.
  
  What we have here are two Bowery books; "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" or just "Maggie" for short, and its companion piece "George's Mother." Followed by "Other Tales of New York" written during the infamous period of the Five Points slums (see "Gangs of New York") with the Bowery bordering its east side. By a young newswriter who failed to graduate from journalism school using not even his own name, but his own money--spending it all to be self-published. Crane correctly assumed that his first novella would not be well-received since its style (later coined American Naturalism) was a literary upheaval not yet known to a public in 1893 that favored romanticism over the ugliness and brutality of urban realism. Politics would prevail. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" in 1906 reiterated horrible working and living conditions to not just rub realism in the public's faces, but to advance socialism. Crane's language is blunt; fighting words crudely rendered in the style of an Irish brogue (comes from the term describing an ugly, thick Irish shoe). It is the slurred, raving, uneducated tongue of the forgotten classes and destitute. An outcry from the city's immigrant denizens--their predetermined fate ordained by poverty--literally fighting (that word, again) for survival in the squalor of Manhattan's south side. John Sloan, whose painting is on the cover, and his brethren--the so-called "Apostles of Ugly" in the Ashcan School whose unflinching realism parallels Crane's literary style--depicts the hopeless conditions of skid row; over-crowded tenements, flophouses, saloons, filth and garbage (children abandoned to the streets) shadowy figures beneath the oppressive cavernous recesses of the Third Avenue El. The never-ending screeching, squeeling, brakes and window-rattling clangor of New York's first elevated iron road; its commuter railway running along the city's oldest, most-infamous thoroughfare; the Bowery. The plot is simple: A fallen fair maiden (a flower in the mud puddle) whose innocence, simplicity, sensitivity, and hope for romance, is betrayed by every hypocrisy, Maggie is turned out unjustly to fend for herself on the streets with the only other means available to her beyond working for pennies in a sweatshop; getting married to an abusive, drunken, violent, unfaithful husband--the same psychopathology as demonstrated by her parents and surving mother; or, that failing, prostitution. Which she pursues spiraling further into despair, inevitably driven to her premature demise; a grim outcome being mysteriously left to one's imagination. Where she encounters a greasy, fat, tattered specimen in rags, a low-life in the gloomiest of districts along some industrial river's edge. "He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled mustache from which beer-drops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish (fairly graphic enough). Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions (?). At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily (interesting word) against timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence." The girl of the crimson legions. Well, that's it. We learn soon thereafter that she has died. Murdered? Suicide? Yes. Going on, as her heartless alcoholic mother wails, to be judged for her sins and for which she forgives her for shaming the "fambly." Not a happy ending. Nor do those stories which follow promise anything uplifting--ending as futilistic twists of fate. But Crane's prose suffices. Not the stuff he would forever be remembered most for. His classic experiential take on the Civil War for which he was an instant success--a war ironically in which he never fought--was, of course, "The Red Badge of Courage." He was also a poet and much-inspired (or taken) by the theater of war and its toll for admission. Considered physically unfit for the Spanish-American war in Cuba, he served instead as a war correspondent--dying from TB just a few years later in June, 1900, at the age of 28 in a German sanitorium. In "Maggie" and his short stories, he frequently refers to an urban lifestyle as that daily battle to which one must reckon. In a comedy of sorts (shorts) called "Mr. Binks' Day Off," a banker takes his citified family to the country for a much-overdue springtime escape. The peaceful tranquility is a shock to their systems. "They had always named the clash of the swords of commerce as sin, crime, but now they began to imagine something admirable in it. It was high wisdom...in light of their contempt for this stillness, the conflicts of the city were exalted. They were at any rate wonderously clever." Not what you'd call stilted prose so prevalent in the final years of the 19th century. Stephen Crane seemed ahead of his time but was prolific notwithstanding his few years the fates granted. I'm mooching this from the inside jacket: "He reported from the American West, Mexico, Greece (that war with Turkey), Cuba, and New York with stories and sketches, his experiences fictionalized as some of the best short works in American literature." Was a resident the last years of his life in England. As lowly as the drinkin' 'n' foyghtin' immigrant Irish are portrayed, he was welcomed there beyond what was afforded, no doubt, to ordinary Yanks from abroad. The British Imperialist Empire versus the Irish. That's another story.
• 
  laura

  man, this book was tedious. i liked the end though. great birth metaphor -- or perhaps unbirth, the giant fat man near the river swallowing her up. (also, by "great birth metaphor" i meant "kind of disgusting birth metaphor").
• 
  Gina

  short. terse. to the point. very illustrative. demonstrates the predator/prey relationship and social darwinist ideals of the early 20th century. shows the impact of family values and environment on individuals amazingly well.