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9781733230018

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Here in June of '94 . . . sitting at a hotel window in Scranton, he put upon a sheet of foolscap a picture. The manuscript is before me: 'The breakers squatted upon the hillsides and in the valley like enormous preying monsters eating of the sunshine, the grass, the green leaves. The smoke and dust from their nostrils had devastated the atmosphere. All that remained of the vegetation looked dark, miserable, half-strangled. Along the summitline of the mountain a few unhappy trees were etched upon the clouds. Overhead stretched a sky of imperial blue, incredibly far away from the somber land.' Is not that a painting? The very genius of the Scranton coal region is there. It suggests a great canvas of a dramatic solemnity. Painters have marveled at the grim impressiveness of the landscape, and John Raught has painted it, but none has pictured it better than Crane in the few words of that paragraph (Gordon K. LInson, My Stephen Crane) For me, this fight is also personal. At 11 years old, my grandfather, Alphonsus Liguori Casey, like thousands of children in northeast Pennsylvania, worked in the anthracite mines as a 'mule boy', who would walk with a mule as it brought up coal from the mines. This work was very dangerous, and young Alphonsus was kicked in the face by a mule. Just a few years earlier, novelist Stephen Crane described those mines as places of 'inscrutable darkness; a soundless place of tangible loneliness.' He listed all the ways a miner would die in that dark, lonely place. (Senator Bob Carey, The Tribune Democrat, Johnstown, PA, December 19, 2016)

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Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871, Crane was the son of a Methodist minister who died early in Crane's life. His mother, also a writer, saw to his early education in strict Methodist schools. Crane spent only one semester at Syracuse University. Although he enjoyed literature classes and playing baseball, his desire to be a journalist superseded any academic interests. At the age of 19, he set off for New York City where he soon fit in with the bohemian artistic community that frequented lower Manhattan. Most of his short career was spent living mainly with relatives and friends in New York as he struggled to make a living writing newspaper articles and publishing works of fiction. The Red Badge of Courage, published in book form soon after In the Depths of a Coal Mine, in 1895 established his position as one of America's major writers. Together with Maggie, A Girl of the Street (1894) and a number of short stories, Crane is often viewed as an early American master of Realism and Naturalism. He died in Germany in 1900 of tuberculosis, after spending two years in Europe. His friendship with fellow writer Joseph Conrad sustained him in many ways during his long-suffering illness. The two were like brothers in their attitudes towards life and writing. He was survived by his common-law wife, Cora Howarth, who took his name, although previously married and never divorced, and died in Jacksonville, Florida in 1910. He had no children. Donna Northouse was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1947. She spent most of her youth in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1969, she married Cameron Northouse. They both received their Ph.D.s in English from the University of South Carolina in the 1970s. Most of Donna's teaching career was spent as an English/humanities teacher at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, Texas (1977-1995). She has also taught English and Education courses at the college level in Dallas, Texas and Baltimore, Maryland. She and Cameron have one son, Clayton Northouse, who lives and work in Washington, D.C. as an attorney. Donna and Cameron moved to Shepherdstown, WV in 2008, after running their bookstore, Clayton Fine Books, for five years in the historic Mt. Vernon District of Baltimore. They still run their rare book company and Donna is heavily involved in doing volunteer research and writing for local history organizations, namely, the Jefferson County, WV Historical Society and the Jefferson County Black History Preservation Society. She has organized many free seminars for teachers and the public on topics related to American history and literature.

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