Stephen Crane was born in 1871 in Newark, NJ, the youngest of fourteen children. He wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets while an undergraduate at Syracuse University. In 1895 he achieved acclaim for The Red Badge of Courage, hailed as the epitome of war stories, although he had never seen battle. An active journalist, he reported from Greece and Cuba in addition to being an acclaimed novelist. He died of tuberculosis in Germany in 1900.