A?i Unwritten Life of Stephen Crane                13

tory of American letters. It was she who first assembled this col¬
lection (including nineteen editions of Crane's works and fifty-
five volumes from his library). She kept together these trunkloads
of documents and mementoes because she planned someday to
write a biography of her husband. One of the completely irreplace¬
able items now at Columbia is a cheap, paper-bound notebook
containing her pencilled notes for this biography, begun the day
after Stephen Crane died.

But Cora Crane did not get beyond a dozen pages of grief-
stricken memories. She never used her treasure-trove of materials.
As neither Thomas Beer nor John Berryman, Crane's only biog¬
raphers, had access to this collection, the definitive work on
Stephen Crane remains to be done.

After Crane's untimely death in England his widow returned to
the United States. At Jacksonville, Florida, she soon set up a resort
known as "The Court." Before long this place gained a reputation
which exiled Mrs. Crane from polite society in that Southern city.
Yet its proprietress had had respectability — as well as charm —
enough to help make so fastidious an observer as Henry James a
family friend and frequent visitor to Brede Place, Crane's English
home. He continued to write to her after Stephen's death; his let¬
ters of condolence are among the most moving documents in the
collection.

Any biography of Stephen Crane will have to take full account
of Cora. As a newspaper correspondent, writing under the name
of Imogene Carter, she became the Marguerite Higgins of the
Graeco-Turkish War in 1897. "In Athens this is war," she wrote,
"... tears and flowers and blood and oratory. Surely there must be
other things. I am going to try and find out at the front." The
Hearst Syndicate soon had bold headlines: "with the howitzers
.. . Last of the Writers to Go . .. Her Bravery Amazes Soldiers."
But Cora's notebooks show a more sensitive, introspective woman
than readers of her dispatches would suspect. Sentimental in the
extreme, she filled her pages with quotations from Bums, Byron,
Shakespeare, Keats, David Copperfield, Mrs. Browning, Seneca,