Introduction
This paper presents seventeen previously unknown articles that we believe to
be by Stephen Crane, published in the 'New-York Tribune' between 1889 and
1892. The articles, printed without byline in what was at the time New York
City's most prestigious newspaper, report on activities in a string of
summer resort towns on New Jersey's northern shore. Scholars had previously
identified fourteen shore reports as Crane's; these newly discovered
articles more than double that corpus. The seventeen articles, witty and
often hilarious, confirm how remarkably early Stephen Crane set his
distinctive writing style and artistic agenda; more than a century after
their publication in the 'Tribune' they remain delightful reading. Stephen
Crane began his career as a professional writer in the summer of 1888, when
he was sixteen °. His assignment was to assist his
brother J. Townley Crane, Jr., almost twenty years older than Stephen, who
had established Crane's New Jersey Coast News Bureau in 1880 when he
arranged to serve as correspondent for the Associated Press and the
'New-York Tribune'. For three-quarters of the year, Townley Crane's duties
must have been light, as he ferreted out news in the sparsely populated
shore towns of Monmouth County. However, during the summer months, the news
bureau's duties exploded. New York City newspapers of the1880's devoted
remarkable amounts of space to chronicling the summer vacations of the
city's upper and upper-middle classes. Every Sunday edition of most New York
newspapers and, during July and August, most daily editions as well, carried
news articles from the summer resorts popular with the more affluent
citizens of Gilded Age New York. The format of these articles was
standardized: a lead proclaimed the resort's unique beauties and the
unprecedented success of the current summer season, a few brief paragraphs
recounted recent events, such as a fund-raising carnival or the opening of a
new hotel, and the article concluded with a lengthy list of names of recent
arrivals and where they were staying. Working within the boundaries of this
restrictive format, Stephen Crane developed a highly original, distinctive
style. His shore reports are as ruthlessly ironic as 'Maggie', the novel he
was writing during the same period, but, instead of directing his irony
towards the inhabitants of the Bowery, he aimed it at the hotel proprietors
and summer visitors of the New Jersey shore.
Discovery And 'Traditional' Attribution
During the 1940's and 1950's, scholars familiar with Crane's style and
interests were able to identify several other unsigned articles in the
'Tribune' as his. By coincidence, all of these articles originated in three
adjoining towns on the Jersey shore: Asbury Park, Ocean Grove and
Avon-by-the-Sea. When Fredson Bowers began editing his massive volume of
Crane's works ° he evidently
decided to limit his search for additional unsigned 'Tribune' articles by
Crane to reports with datelines from those three resorts. Combing the
'Tribune' during the summer months from 1888 to 1892, Bowers identified as
Crane's three articles overlooked by previous scholars, bringing the total
of New Jersey shore reports to fourteen. No one questioned Bowers' decision
to focus on the three adjoining shore communities. However, during research
on a book concerning Stephen Crane's journalism, we came across an item in
the Schoberlin collection at the Syracuse University Library that threw into
doubt Bowers' procedure. A one-page prospectus for Crane's New Jersey Coast
News Bureau was found which provided evidence of an attempt by Townley Crane
to expand his business. In particular, the body of the prospectus lists
shore towns ranging from Atlantic Highlands in the north to Seaside Park in
the south. With this evidence of the Crane news bureau's wide geographical
range, we began to question why all of the shore articles attributed to
Stephen originated from Asbury Park and the two towns just south of it.
Would it not make sense for Townley to send his teenaged brother to cover
news in the resorts a few miles distant from their home base of Asbury Park
and save himself the trouble? We searched the 'New-York Tribune' for the
summers of 1888 to 1892, when Stephen was fired, looking for articles with a
dateline from the wider base of New Jersey shore towns named in Townley
Crane's prospectus. The Crane brothers' writing styles are widely divergent.
Reading Townley's articles (written before Stephen began his journalistic
career), it is evident that his style is that of brief, invariably
flattering prose, while Stephen delighted in gleeful irony. This search
revealed seventeen articles datelined from the shore towns of Long Branch,
Belmar, Spring Lake and Sea Girt that appear to have the style of Stephen
Crane. Hotel proprietors, baggage handlers and "summer maidens" are all
written about with disdain. The articles are so stylistically distinctive in
their irony and verbal inventiveness that they clearly look to be from
Stephen's hand rather than from Townley's.
'Non-Traditional' Attribution: Stylometry
Stylometry provides an alternative and objective analysis. The stylometric
task facing us was to examine the seventeen articles and attribute them to
either Stephen or Townley Crane. Suitable control samples in more than one
genre are required, so, within the genre of fiction, several textual samples
of about 3,000 words were obtained from 'The Red Badge of Courage' and
Joseph Conrad's 'The Nigger of the Narcissus', the latter being chosen
because we know that Crane and Conrad read and admired each other's novels.
For journalistic controls, we turned to Richard Harding Davis and Jacob
Riis, who were, along with Crane, the most prominent American journalists of
the 1890's. Examples of Stephen Crane's New Jersey shore reports, New York
City journalism, and war correspondence were taken from the University of
Virginia edition of Crane's work; samples of Townley Crane's journalism were
taken from the 'New-York Tribune'. The seventeen anonymous articles were
first merged, the resultant text then being split into two halves of
approximately 1800 words each. The "Burrows" technique °, which works
with large sets of frequently occurring function words, is a proven and
powerful tool in authorship attribution. Essentially it picks the N most
common words in the corpus under investigation and computes the occurrence
rate of these N words in each text or text-unit. Multivariate statistical
techniques are then applied to the resultant data to look for patterns. The
first phase in the investigation was designed to establish the validity of
the Burrows technique on the known textual samples detailed above. Using
principal components analysis, the Crane and Conrad fiction samples are
clearly distinguishable from each other. Turning to the three genres within
Crane's journalism, the principal components analysis on the occurrence
rates of non-contextual function words shows, quite remarkably, how their
rates of usage differ between his New York City, shore and war journalism,
yet remain internally consistent within these genres. A final analysis
incorporating the samples of journalistic writing from Townley Crane,
Richard Harding Davis and Jacob Riis provides further validation of the
Burrows method with a clear distinction visible between the shore journalism
of Townley Crane and Stephen Crane. Discarding the control samples, which
have served their purpose, we then focus on the main task, namely the
attribution of the seventeen anonymous articles to either Stephen or
Townley. Both cluster analysis and principal components analysis provide
mutually supportive results in attributing the anonymous articles to the
youthful ironist Stephen Crane. The "non-traditional" analysis has supplied
objective, stylometric evidence which supports the "traditional" scholarship
on the problem of authorship. We believe that this joint interdisciplinary
approach should be the way in which attributional research is conducted.