Stephen Crane was 24 years old when his masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, was published in 1895. The novel — known for its irony, its realistic battle scenes, and its poetic imagery — features Henry Fleming, a protagonist just a few years younger than Crane at the time. The story, about a Union soldier who flees from battle, took on a life of its own and has never gone out of print.

Crane described his book as a study in fear. He had used the Civil War setting to enhance the novel’s emotional impact, which it did. So effective was his writing that people thought he was much older than he was; they also believed he had fought in the war. But he had never been in a battle. He had interviewed several veterans and read old articles in magazines about the war, but ultimately he imagined the story.

The youngest of 14 children of a Methodist preacher and his wife, Crane was born in Newark, N.J. Only nine of the children survived infancy. The family frequently moved as his father was transferred to various parishes. Stevie, as he was called, began to read at four. At the same age, he nearly drowned in New Jersey’s Raritan River because he fearlessly walked into it until the water was up to his face. He would have gone under if an older brother hadn’t pulled him out.

After his father died, when Crane was eight, his mother supported the family by working as a freelance writer of religious articles for Methodist publications. The daughter and sister of Methodist ministers, she was strict in her religious beliefs and crusaded against gambling, smoking, drinking, dancing, and other frivolous activities, including the reading of novels.

Although he had written short stories as a boy, Crane’s career started when he began reporting for the New Jersey Coast News Bureau, a newspaper managed by his brother, Townley, a professional journalist. Soon Crane went on to publish articles and sketches in the New York Tribune. In 1892, he moved to New York City and worked as a freelance writer. His articles mostly focused on the impoverished classes, including the homeless.

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the first of Crane’s novellas, was partly inspired by his newspaper articles on the seedy underlife of the Bowery. Self-published, the story came out in 1893 under the pseudonym “Johnston Smith.” Sup­posedly, Crane didn’t want to scandalize his family.

To enliven his reporting, Crane practiced a type of proto–New Journalism, decades before the genre was born in the 1960s. In writing about the poor, he lived on the streets, even staying outside during snowstorms. He in­terviewed chorus girls and stayed in flophouses and brothels. (Once, he befriended and defended a prostitute who was being hounded by the police.) To study war, he worked as a war cor­respondent in the mid to late 1890s in Cuba, Greece, and Puerto Rico. He contracted typhoid, malaria, yellow fever, and the tuberculosis that eventually killed him.

After he moved to England in 1898, Crane became friends with literary stars such as Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. He wrote prolifically during this time and ultimately published five novels, two novellas, over 200 short stories, tales, and sketches, two books of poetry, and hundreds of newspaper articles. Even when he was dying and too weak to sit up and hold a pen in his hand, he whispered his stories to his common-law wife, Cora. At 28 years old, his body was worn out. He died of TB on June 5, 1900, in a sanitarium at Badenweiler in the Black Forest. Cora brought his body back to the U.S. to be buried in Hillside, N.J.

Paul Auster, in his new book, Burning Boy, argues that Crane is a writer of “unimpeachable brilliance” and is “Amer­ica’s answer to Keats and Shelley, to Schubert and Mozart.”

A prizewinning author and poet, Auster offers a nearly 800-page study that is less like a story of a life and more like an argument for the quality of Crane’s writing. He combs through Crane’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Writing from the perspective of an old writer admiring a young writer’s talent, Auster suggests that one read Crane “slowly and deliberately, sentence by sentence, with brief pauses.”

Auster writes in a conversational style, occasionally using colloquialisms and clichés. His book is reminiscent of sitting in a graduate class and listening to a professor delve into the intricacies of Crane’s oeuvre. But the text is somewhat hard to follow as it zigs and zags from anecdotes about Crane’s life to lengthy excerpts from his work accompanied by Auster’s analysis, which can be heavy reading. Several times I consulted my copy of Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry (Library of America) so that I could more fully understand Auster’s references.

The book contains some light touches, however, as in a photograph of Crane holding one of his three dogs — most likely his favorite, Sponge. Auster also points out that Crane loved horses and once brought one to live in his brother’s barn (which didn’t seem to be appreciated). Crane liked risk-taking, adventure, and colors — especially the color red. Once, as a small child, he followed a visitor out of the house because he was fascinated by her red skirt. Crane used colors frequently in his work, as is apparent in his titles: “A Dark Brown Dog,” “The Black Riders,” “The Blue Hotel,” and others.

Auster believes that Crane had synesthesia, in that sounds were colors to him. Crane said that every sound triggered a color in his brain. This steady neurological bombardment made him a “human tuning fork” and was the source of the “strangeness of his work,” according to Auster. One might compare his writing to a kaleidoscope. Take, for instance, the opening of his essay “The Open Boat”:

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea.

Although among his fans Crane’s novels and short stories tended to be his most popular work, Crane himself preferred his poetry collections, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War Is Kind. Both display his talent for the telling detail and evocative image as well as his sense of irony. They also show the influence of the Japanese haiku and anticipate the imagist movement, which was on the horizon. I find so much condensed and pent-up energy in a Crane poem that reading it is like watching someone pull a rubber band until it snaps with a shocker ending.

Poem LXII in The Black Riders exemplifies the power of his style, as well as what Auster argues is Crane’s bedrock message: “Life is lived face to face and nose to nose with death.” (This poem also partly inspired the “Burning Boy” of Auster’s title.)

There was a man who lived a life of fire.
Even upon the fabric of time,
Where purple becomes orange
And orange purple,
This life glowed,
A dire red stain, indelible;
Yet when he was dead,
He saw that he had not lived.

As this comprehensive biography suggests, Crane stands at the cusp of modernism; his work turned away from 19th-century novels, which told readers what to think and feel. Instead, Crane “established a literature of pure telling,” which brings his imagined world alive and thereby enriches his readers.