Stephen Crane's career was so brief-lasting only from 1893 through 1899-and his fiction so vibrant and complex that scholars have tended to hunt for a single thematic or stylistic key to his work. In the thirteen essays collected here, Donald Pizer draws on decades of his own work on Crane to argue instead that Crane's fiction demonstrates a fundamental instability-that Crane was, above all, a writer in motion-and that the nature and quality of any one of his works can best be understood by viewing it in relation to Crane's own shifting and developing ideas.

The essays collected here constitute in to a significant and coherent reading both of Crane's persistent preoccupation's during his short career and of his changing perspective on these preoccupation's. The volume can thus be profitably considered both as a collection of perceptive readings bearing on specific areas of interest in Crane studies and, in wider focus, as a contribution to an understanding of Crane's mind and art as a whole.