When Willa Cather Met Stephen Crane

The meeting discussed, care of Reader's Almanac.

From the piece...

Just two years younger yet clearly starstruck, Cather gives us one of the most vivid contemporary first-person impressions of Crane (whose birthday is today, November 1):

He was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and were badly run over at the heel.

Crane was notoriously reticent about talking about his writing and he rebuffed many of Cather’s attempts to engage him. Yet “on the last night he spent in Lincoln,” a remarkable conversation took place when the two were alone in the newspaper office:

Other men, he said, could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday's impressions made to-day's "copy." But when he came in from the streets to write up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.

I mentioned The Red Badge of Courage, which was written in nine days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time, he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite imaginary experiences. . . "The detail of a thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native product, but it takes forever," he remarked.

Cather published “When I Knew Stephen Crane” in the June 23, 1900, issue of the Pittsburgh Library, less than three weeks after Crane’s death from tuberculosis, and more than five years after their meeting.