Active Service

This is the extended annotated edition including a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, his life and works. In "Active Service" Mr. Stephen Crane has applied his literary method, which aptly suits the unusual, to the commonplace. A battlefield stands Mr. Crane's descriptive staccato. A newspaper office does not. So far as the reader goes, the result is a story which opens with interest and closes with confused dull talk and incident. Mr. Crane has taken the new Sunday supplement newspaper man, had him fall in love with the daughter of a professor of Greek, put the professor, his family, and a chorus of students in the vortex of the Greek war and let the hero rescue them, with a comic opera singer thrown in to play Potiphar's wife to the Sunday supplement man's Joseph. This ought to be interesting to the end, but it is interesting only abont to the middle, the illusion of reality being lost midway. Now Mr. Crane is a realist.