A Study Guide for Stephen Crane's "Open Boat"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Stephen Crane's "Open Boat," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535830300

Book preview

1

The Open Boat

Stephen Crane

1897

Introduction

Published in 1897, The Open Boat is based on an actual incident from Stephen Crane’s life in January of that year. While traveling to Cuba to work as a newspaper correspondent during the Cuban insurrection against Spain, Crane was stranded at sea for thirty hours after his ship, the Commodore, sank off the coast of Florida. Crane and three other men were forced to navigate their way to shore in a small boat. One of the men, an oiler named Billy Higgins, drowned while trying to swim to shore. Crane wrote the story The Open Boat soon afterward. The story tells of the travails of four men shipwrecked at sea who must make their way to shore in a dinghy. Crane’s grippingly realistic depiction of their life-threatening ordeal captures the sensations and emotions of struggle for survival against the forces of nature. Because of the work’s philosophical speculations, it is often classified as a work of Naturalism, a literary offshoot of the Realist movement. The Open Boat has proved an enduring classic that speaks to the timeless experience of suffering a close call with death.

Author Biography

Stephen Crane enjoyed both popular success and critical acclaim as a leading American author of the Realist school. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871, Crane was the youngest of fourteen children born to Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane. His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a devout social activist. Crane was raised in the idealistic atmosphere of evangelical reformism. Crane’s father died in 1880 and his mother had to support the family by doing church work and writing for religious journals. Death became a familiar event in the Crane household; by 1892 only seven of the fourteen children were still