A man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty. In the course of his tragically abbreviated career, Stephen Crane (1871 1900) saw things that his contemporaries preferred to overlook the low life of New York s Irish slums; the tedium, brutality, and chaos that were the true conditions of the Civil War; the ambiguous contract that binds a terrified man to his killer and the damned to their human judges. He communicated what he saw with the same laconic factuality that characterized...