In the 1890s, no one took Stephen Crane lightly or casually. From the start his work sparked controversy, renewed with every publication he crowded into the single decade of his career. There was great and noisy disagreement over the merits of his journalism, his first novel, his poetry, his early stories and sketches—in short, everything he wrote. Those who championed him no less than those who attacked him worked hard at describing that writing, characterizing it or fixing it into categories. It was praised and it was ridiculed. He was personally reviled and occasionally honored. The evidence is in the reviews. Even his early death did not modify the situation, at least not immediately, though the poet Wallace Stevens thought he detected change.

On June 5, 1900, the twenty-eight-year-old Stephen Crane died in Badenweiler, Baden, where his wife, Cora, had taken him in the final days of his illness. During the long journey to his interment in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the young writer was memorialized at the Central Metropolitan Temple in New York. The New York Tribune man who reported on the funeral service filed a modest, non-committal and rather perfunctory account of the service. Only seventy-two years later, when a selection of the unidentified reporter's letters was published, did the world learn that Wallace Stevens had covered the funeral service for Crane, a fellow-poet only three years his senior.