An Experiment in Misery by Stephen Crane

The month before the appearance of “An Experiment in Misery” in the Press, a group of unemployed men led by populist businessman Jacob Coxey began a protest march in Ohio by the time Crane’s story appeared, the national media had stirred up a fright when “ Coxey’s Army” threatened to amass thousands of unemployed men demanding that the government create public works employment. The fears intensified after the Panic of 1893, when the nation entered its most serious economic depression to date and the middle class went into full panic mode about the increasing number of penniless migrants. Newspaper stories on indigent Americans and the “Tramp Menace” were common during the late nineteenth century. The experiment becomes experience.Ĭrane scholar Michael Robertson has found that, just prior to the publication of the story, there had been two “real” sketches by New York Press reporters disguising themselves as homeless beggars. Without the metafiction of the framing device, the later version of the story changes its perspective: instead of a man pretending to be a tramp, the lead character seems to be a man who has recently become one.

Written for “The Press” by the Author of “Maggie.”Four years later Crane included the story in the collection The Open Boat, and he omitted not only this sequence of wildly sensationalist headlines but also a narrative that framed the piece, in which two men regard a tramp on the street and wonder what it would be like to live such an existence-thus the “experiment” of the title. Web store price: $31.50When the New York Press published Stephen Crane’s latest story toward the end of April 1894, the ladder-style headline read:Īn Evening, a Night and a Morning with Those Cast Out.īut His Royalty, to the Novitiate, Has Drawbacks of Smells and Bugs.Ī Wonderfully Vivid Picture of a Strange Phase of New York Life, “ When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,” Stephen Crane

Willa Cather meets Stephen Crane in Nebraska “ Tramps’ Terror,” an 1877 advertisement in response to the “Tramp Menace”Ĭhristopher Benfey on Stephen Crane’s debut as a poet

An Experiment in Misery by Stephen Crane