Solving Stephen Crane's Pike County Puzzle

Abstract

URING the summer of I894 Stephen Crane went camping with some friends near Port Jervis, New York. Somehow that camping trip produced a curious newspaper hoax entitled The Pike County Puzzle. Neither fact has seemed particularly significant, but both events took place at the critical moment in Crane's life when his literary future was being determined. He had submitted manuscripts of The Red Badge of Courage and The Black Riders and Other Lines and was awaiting the publishers' decisions. The year before he had gambled and lost twice with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It had been rejected by commercial publishers and when Crane turned to self-publishing he wasted his mother's inheritance. He had lost big, he was twenty-two years old, and he was impatient for success. His summer of waiting for the outcome of his new gambles should not have been as carefree as his biographers make it and in reality it was not. To see that reality, however, requires starting from recognitions that the camping trip came at a pivotal moment in Crane's life and the Puzzle is the best available access to that moment. Then with newly-discovered facts and a new look at old facts the Puzzle can be solved. The result is a more interesting, more believable, and more human Stephen Crane than the cardboard doll found in literary biographies. The Puzzle was a burlesque newspaper written and published to celebrate the trip. Its existence went unrecognized for more than fifty years before it was recorded in a bibliography as a piece of miscellanea and curiosa.' Then the Puzzle confounded scholars,