Although fellow novelists William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland immediately recognized the genius of the twenty-one-year-old author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in 1893 most readers were unwilling to accept its unconventional theme and were uneasy with a style that was at one and the same time darkly naturalistic and vividly impressionistic. Today Maggie is esteemed as an American classic, the first of a powerful group of works in which Crane explored the underside of urban life and portrayed the ways in which the rise of the metropolis altered not just the human environment but human nature itself.<BR>This volume also includes "George's Mother" and eleven other tales and sketches of New York written between 1892 and 1896. Together in their poised realism these tales confirm Crane's place as the first modern American writer.