Stephen Crane

                         Maggie, a Girl of the Streets

                                Publisher's Note

The interest which has been shown in The Red Badge of Courage has been most
gratifying, but it has also involved a few inaccuracies of statement in regard
to the history of Mr. Crane's literary work. The Red Badge of Courage was
offered to and accepted by the publishers in December, 1894, and it was
published in October, 1895. As it happened, the actual publication in England
came some two months later. By that time the American press had appreciated the
quality of the book so cordially and unanimously as to dispose of the lingering
tradition that only a well-known author, or an author with the hall mark of
foreign approval, is recognised by our reviewers.
    As to the book which succeeds The Red Badge of Courage, it should be said
that Maggie has never been published before, even in serial form. The story was
put into type and copyrighted by Mr. Crane three years ago, but this real and
strenuous tale of New York life is now given to the public for the first time.
 

                                An Appreciation

I think that what strikes me most in the story of »Maggie« is that quality of
fatal necessity which dominates Greek tragedy. From the conditions it all had to
be, and there were the conditions. I felt this in Mr. Hardy's »Jude,« where the
principle seems to become conscious in the writer; but there is apparently no
consciousness of any such motive in the author of »Maggie.« Another effect is
that of an ideal of artistic beauty which is as present in the working out of
this poor girl's squalid romance as in any classic fable. This will be
foolishness, I know, to the many foolish people who cannot discriminate between
the material and the treatment in art, and think that beauty is inseparable from
daintiness and prettiness, but I do not speak to them. I appeal rather to such
as feel themselves akin with every kind of human creature, and find neither high
nor low when it is a question of inevitable suffering, or of a soul struggling
vainly with an inexorable fate.
    My rhetoric scarcely suggests the simple terms the author uses to produce
the effect which I am trying to repeat again. They are simple, but always most
graphic, especially when it comes to the personalities of the story; the girl
herself, with her bewildered wish to be right and good, with her distorted
perspective, her clinging and generous affections, her hopeless environments;
the horrible old drunken mother, a cyclone of violence and volcano of vulgarity;
the