Stephen Crane loved dogs, horses, children, cigarettes, beer and Lily – the latter in vain, although she was also fond of him, but not for life. What happened between the two when no one was looking is not known. Paul Auster suggests that a married woman like Lily was more open to sex than an unmarried woman in the late nineteenth century. There is nothing more to be said on the matter as far as Lily is concerned, and this is one of the few, if not the only, gaps in Auster’s comprehensive biography of Stephen Crane, whom he greatly admired and who lived, and surprisingly did, from 1871 to 1900 to Auster’s torment is on his way to oblivion.
What a man loved who died at the age of 28 is one of the most important things that should be recorded about his life. With a writer like Stephen Crane, they are accessories to his greatest love, writing. From it grew an amazingly broad body of literary work, which includes sketches and commentaries, reports and short stories, poems, short stories and novels, including one of the most famous of the heyday of American literature, namely “The Red Badge of Courage”, published in 1895 (and Filmed by John Huston in 1951). In Germany, the book was first published in 1954 by Hans Umstätter as “Das Blutmal”; a year later, Milo Dor and Elisabeth Moltkau transferred it and called it “The Flag of Courage” – which doesn’t quite match the title, because the “red medal for bravery” actually sarcastically means an only supposed injury from a battle in the American Civil War. In 1961, Volk und Welt was translated by Eduard Klein and Klaus Marschke, this time the book was called “Das rote Siegel”. This version remained the current one for a long time until Bernd Gockel retranslated the novel for Pendragon in 2020 under the original title “The Red Medal for Bravery”.
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