Stephen Crane and the New-York Tribune: A Case Study in Traditional and Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution

Abstract

This paper describes how traditional andnon-traditional methods were used to identifyseventeen previously unknown articles that webelieve to be by Stephen Crane, published inthe New-York Tribune between 1889 and1892. The articles, printed without byline inwhat was at the time New York City's mostprestigious newspaper, report on activities ina string of summer resort towns on New Jersey'snorthern shore. Scholars had previouslyidentified fourteen shore reports as Crane's;these possible attributions more than doublethat corpus. The seventeen articles confirmhow remarkably early Stephen Crane set hisdistinctive writing style and artistic agenda. In addition, the sheer quantity of the articlesfrom the summer of 1892 reveals how vigorouslythe twenty-year-old Crane sought to establishhimself in the role of professional writer. Finally, our discovery of an article about theNew Jersey National Guard's summer encampmentreveals another way in which Crane immersedhimself in nineteenth-century military cultureand help to explain how a young man who hadnever seen a battle could write so convincinglyof war in his soon-to-come masterpiece,The Red Badge of Courage. We argue that thejoint interdisciplinary approach employed inthis paper should be the way in whichattributional research is conducted.