American writer Stephen Crane was BOTD in 1871. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of 14 children, his father died when he was eight and he was raised by his elder siblings. A talented student, he worked for a news bureau on his summer holidays, he briefly studied engineering at university, before moving to New York City to pursue a literary career. He began publishing stories in the 1890s, causing a scandal with his 1893 novella Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a novel about a woman forced into poverty and prostitution. He won international acclaim for his 1895 The Red Badge of Courage, a harrowing portrait of a young soldier in the American Civil War, which he wrote despite having no military experience. The following year his reputation was trashed following his involvement in a highly publicised trial of a suspected prostitute. He fled to Greece where he worked as a war correspondent and then travelled to Cuba, surviving a shipwreck and swimming to shore, an experience described in his short story The Open Boat. Unable to enter Cuba, he returned to Europe, reporting on the Greco-Turkish war for The New York Journal. Despite his prodigious output, he continually struggled with debt, eventually relocating to England with his mistress, a former prostitute and brothel-keeper Cora Taylor. Settling in a manor house in Sussex, they bankrupted themselves entertaining celebrity friends including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, H. G. Wells and Henry James. A long-time sufferer of malaria, Crane died of tuberculosis in 1900, aged 28. Largely forgotten at his death, his short stories became highly influential on Modernist literature, notably in the work of Ernest Hemingway. Among his unfinished works was the novel Flowers of Asphalt, a study of male prostitution. The manuscript was destroyed in mysterious circumstances, possibly to conceal rumours of Crane’s bisexuality.