Stephen Crane (1871–1900) lived only twenty-eight years, but in that time he established himself as a great American fiction writer and poet. A literary pioneer, Crane applied to fiction his belief that human beings are pawns, moved by forces beyond their control to take actions beyond their understanding. This idea that nature—the forces of heredity and environment—causes humans to think, believe, feel, and act as they do is known in philosophy as Determinism and in literary theory as Naturalism. To the Determinist or Naturalist, free will is an illusion, because the decisions that people believe they are making freely are in fact the inevitable consequences of the forces acting upon them.

Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of fourteen children. His father, a Methodist minister, died when Crane was nine years old. Crane attended Syracuse University, but left after one semester. In 1893, Crane finished revising his novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the draft of which he had finished while at Syracuse. Shocked by the novel's grim realism, publishers rejected the book, and Crane paid for its publication himself. In 1894, Crane's masterful novel about the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, was published serially in a magazine, and Crane began work as a reporter. In 1895, the novel was released in book form, and Crane's reputation was established. That same year, Crane issued the first volume of his experimental free verse, The Black Rider. This was followed by another volume of poetry, War Is Kind, in 1899.

Crane's experiences as a reporter in Mexico, the American West, and Florida provided material for a number of short stories, including "The Blue Hotel" and "The Open Boat." As a reporter, Crane covered the Greco-Turkish War and the Spanish-American War, seeing firsthand the cruelties of battle about which he had written so eloquently. Before his death, Crane spent some time in England, where he met many famous writers, including H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. By that time, he was severely ill with tuberculosis. He died at a health spa in Badenweiler, Germany.