Not yet famous for his Civil War masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane was unable to find a publisher for his brilliant Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, finally printing it himself in 1893. Condemned and misunderstood during Crane’s lifetime, this starkly realistic story of a pretty child of the Bowery has since been recognized as a landmark work in American fiction. Now Crane’s great short novel of life in turn-of-the-century New York is published in its original form, along with four of Crane’s best short stories–The Blue Hotel, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, The Monster, and The Open Boat–stories of such remarkable power and clarity that they stand among the finest short stories ever written by an American.