The Open Boat
The Open Boat is a short story by American author Stephen Crane. First published in 1897, it was based on Crane’s experience of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar.
About The Open Boat in brief
The Open Boat is a short story by American author Stephen Crane. First published in 1897, it was based on Crane’s experience of surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida earlier that year. Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours when his ship, the SS Commodore, sank after hitting a sandbar. He and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat; one of the men, an oiler named Billie Higgins, drowned after the boat overturned. Crane’s personal account of the shipwreck and the men’s survival was first published a few days after his rescue. Crane subsequently adapted his report into narrative form, and the resulting short story was published in Scribner’s Magazine. The story is told from the point of view of an anonymous correspondent, with Crane as the implied author. It is notable for its use of imagery, irony, symbolism and the exploration of such themes as survival, solidarity and the conflict between man and nature. H. G. Wells considered it to be \”beyond all question, the crown of all work\”. Crane’s story is considered an exemplary work of literary Naturalism, and is one of most frequently discussed works in Crane’s canon. A volume titled The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure was published in the U.S. in 1898; an edition entitled The Open boat and Other Stories was published simultaneously in England.
The story was written in response to a request from H.G. Wells for a story to be published during the Greco-Turkish War in 1898. Crane completed the story a few weeks later, in mid-February. He later went on to work as a war correspondent for the Bacheller newspaper syndicate during the Cuban insurrection against Spain. The ship sank at 7 a.m. on January 2, 1897, and he and three others floundered off Florida for a day and a half before attempting to land their craft at Daytona Beach. Crane described the engine room as resembling \”a scene at this time taken from the middle kitchen of Hades… That is just how it happened, and how we felt. Read me some more of the incident, Steve . Read it some more. Read it now! The account, which appeared on the front page of the New York Press on January 7 1897, was quickly reprinted in various papers. The account concentrates on the sinking of the Commodore and the ensuing chaos. Crane dedicates just two paragraphs to the fate of his compatriots on the dinghy, while detailing their inability to save those stranded on the ship: The cook let go, then swung back to windward, and then the Commodore sank. She lurched to the back of the line and then swung to the windward and then lurched back, all this time in silence, but there were no shrieks, no groans, but silence, and silence, back and forth.
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This page is based on the article The Open Boat published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
