Burning Boy

A major re-assessment of the genius of Stephen Crane – best known for The Red Badge of Courage.

American writer Stephen Crane died in 1900 at the age of twenty-eight. In his short, intense life, this burning boy wrote a masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, as well as other novels, short stories and dispatches from the fronts of two wars. His adventurous life took him to the Wild West, to Mexico, and then to Cuba during the Spanish–American War, dodging bullets that killed those around him and suffering shipwreck on his way home.

Fleeing America to escape a scandalous love affair, Crane spent his last eighteen months in Britain, where he became a close friend of H. G. Wells, Henry James and, in particular, Joseph Conrad. In Burning Boy, the intention is to restore Crane to the pantheon of twentieth-century modernist authors such as Conrad, and through Auster’s own skill as a novelist, Crane leaps off the page and into the reader’s heart.

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He has also been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (4321), for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than forty languages.