Stephen Crane

The fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, Crane left college without a degree and worked as a journalist in New York's slums, self-publishing Maggie: A Girl of the Streets under a pseudonym in 1893 after no one would touch its subject. The Red Badge of Courage, written from imagination and interviews with veterans rather than firsthand combat, made him internationally famous when it appeared in 1895.

He then went looking for war himself, surviving the sinking of a gunrunning ship off Florida in 1897 (an ordeal that produced the story 'The Open Boat') before covering the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American Wars as a correspondent. He settled in England with Cora Taylor, a hotel proprietor he never formally married, and became close friends with Joseph Conrad and Henry James.

Chronic tuberculosis, worsened by his wartime exposure, killed him in a German sanatorium in 1900, at twenty-eight.