Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Crane played baseball at Syracuse University, and claimed he was good enough to play professionally. Uh-huh, sure you were. (Source)
Apparently, Crane was a real scrapper. He attended Lafayette College for less than a year, and his teachers recalled he would "rather fight than study." Not quite the personality you'd expect from a thoughtful, eloquent author, is it? (Source)
Crane was the son of a Methodist minister who was an advocate of temperance (that is, not drinking, not dancing, etc). To the horror of his parents, he would eventually move to the Bowery in New York City to immerse himself in the seediest aspects of urban life. If you're in the dark on NYC's hottest neighborhoods in the late 19th century, the Bowery was basically the Brooklyn of its day—so hip. (He would use this experience to greatest effect in his book Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.) (Source)
Unlike "The Open Boat," which was taken directly from Crane's own experience, his book Red Badge of Courage takes place during the Civil War. Not only was Crane born five years after the war ended, he never even stepped foot on a battlefield, and this was long before the Internet, which obviously begs the question, how did he do it? (Source)
Attention all jocks out there: Crane claimed he learned how to write about war by playing football. Whoever said sports and school don't mix was clearly in the wrong. (Source)