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Bibliographers and the scholars who rely on them have for the most part slighted the West-to-East transatlantic migration of American literature. In failing to discover the facts about the publication, distribution, and reception of American literature in the English-reading world, these researchers have not only cut themselves off from usable evidence about the influence of American literature — they have also deprived themselves of crucial information about those American authors whose careers were largely shaped by their success abroad.
Stephen Crane's British and Empire publications offer an eloquent case in point. Crane exiled himself in England during his most productive years, laboring to build not just a British following but, like Henry James and other American writers, a career in another country. He achieved prominence as a novelist with the publication of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895; he died in 1900. From 1897 on — two-thirds of his major career — he was headquartered in England. Perhaps he chose to live in that country in part because he had a congenial publisher there: William Heinemann distributed nine titles by him, more than did any American publisher. But there have been four Stephen Crane bibliographies,[1] three biographies,[2] and four book-length studies[3] — one of them a study of
The following is an inventory of unrecorded information about Stephen Crane's British books. It is not intended as definitive in this area of Crane bibliography; only incidentally is it presented as a contribution to that bibliography. It is intended primarily to fill in the picture of the artifacts by which Crane was represented to his readers by his publishers, simply as the source material for a discussion of some important ways a working scholar can use the results of bibliographical investigation to construct a sound and thorough consideration of an author's career — if by only raising questions about assumptions.
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