Some writers are brilliant, some have good business models, some donate their talent to other causes others simply don’t have the time or resources to do anything besides work to live. It is perhaps useful, as writers sit clacking at laptops, to hear the story of someone else who spent their life asking editors for checks needed yesterday and trying to write a sentence good enough to make a buck while hoping something better was cooking in their brain in the background. But it is still worth pausing to remember her for a moment.
It isn’t necessary to restore every forgotten writer to the canon some achieved what they could during their time, influencing and seeding possibilities where they could.
She was also not wrong: her stories are mostly terrible. Cora remains mostly forgotten, an accessory or footnote to other histories. The poet Wallace Stevens had covered Stephen’s funeral for the New York Tribune, later remarking in his journal that the church, a United Methodist one in the West Village, was nearly empty, and that the 28-year-old author “certainly deserved something better than this absolutely common-place, bare, silly service I have just come from.” After an initial fade from literary consideration, Stephen’s writing was retrieved from obscurity and dropped into the canon. “I am of the opinion that it is criminal for people to write who know nothing about it-but one must live, and I must work to live.” “I’ve been trying to write short stories but they are woefully bad,” she wrote to novelist Hamlin Garland on September 17. There were still some short stories of his left to sell, perhaps a biography of him left to write, but what to do after that? But the author of The Red Badge of Courage had been dead for more than three months. This wasn’t a new state of affairs there was never enough money, even when her common-law husband Stephen Crane had been alive.
By September 1900, Cora Crane was desperate for money.
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