Stephen Crane and the 'New-York Tribune': a Case Study in Traditional and Non-traditional Authorship Attribution

Introduction

This paper presents seventeen previously unknown articles that we believe to be by Stephen Crane, published in the 'New-York Tribune' between 1889 and 1892. The articles, printed without byline in what was at the time New York City's most prestigious newspaper, report on activities in a string of summer resort towns on New Jersey's northern shore. Scholars had previously identified fourteen shore reports as Crane's; these newly discovered articles more than double that corpus. The seventeen articles, witty and often hilarious, confirm how remarkably early Stephen Crane set his distinctive writing style and artistic agenda; more than a century after their publication in the 'Tribune' they remain delightful reading. Stephen Crane began his career as a professional writer in the summer of 1888, when he was sixteen [1]. His assignment was to assist his brother J. Townley Crane, Jr., almost twenty years older than Stephen, who had established Crane's New Jersey Coast News Bureau in 1880 when he arranged to serve as correspondent for the Associated Press and the 'New-York Tribune'. For three-quarters of the year, Townley Crane's duties must have been light, as he ferreted out news in the sparsely populated shore towns of Monmouth County. However, during the summer months, the news bureau's duties exploded. New York City newspapers of the1880's devoted remarkable amounts of space to chronicling the summer vacations of the city's upper and upper-middle classes. Every Sunday edition of most New York newspapers and, during July and August, most daily editions as well, carried news articles from the summer resorts popular with the more affluent citizens of Gilded Age New York. The format of these articles was standardized: a lead proclaimed the resort's unique beauties and the unprecedented success of the current summer season, a few brief paragraphs recounted recent events, such as a fund-raising carnival or the opening of a new hotel, and the article concluded with a lengthy list of names of recent arrivals and where they were staying. Working within the boundaries of this restrictive format, Stephen Crane developed a highly original, distinctive style. His shore reports are as ruthlessly ironic as 'Maggie', the novel he was writing during the same period, but, instead of directing his irony towards the inhabitants of the Bowery, he aimed it at the hotel proprietors and summer visitors of the New Jersey shore.

Discovery And 'Traditional' Attribution

During the 1940's and 1950's, scholars familiar with Crane's style and interests were able to identify several other unsigned articles in the 'Tribune' as his. By coincidence, all of these articles originated in three adjoining towns on the Jersey shore: Asbury Park, Ocean Grove and Avon-by-the-Sea. When Fredson Bowers began editing his massive volume of Crane's works [2], he evidently decided to limit his search for additional unsigned 'Tribune' articles by Crane to reports with datelines from those three resorts. Combing the 'Tribune' during the summer months from 1888 to 1892, Bowers identified as Crane's three articles overlooked by previous scholars, bringing the total of New Jersey shore reports to fourteen. No one questioned Bowers' decision to focus on the three adjoining shore communities. However, during research on a book concerning Stephen Crane's journalism, we came across an item in the Schoberlin collection at the Syracuse University Library that threw into doubt Bowers' procedure. A one-page prospectus for Crane's New Jersey Coast News Bureau was found which provided evidence of an attempt by Townley Crane to expand his business. In particular, the body of the prospectus lists shore towns ranging from Atlantic Highlands in the north to Seaside Park in the south. With this evidence of the Crane news bureau's wide geographical range, we began to question why all of the shore articles attributed to Stephen originated from Asbury Park and the two towns just south of it. Would it not make sense for Townley to send his teenaged brother to cover news in the resorts a few miles distant from their home base of Asbury Park and save himself the trouble? We searched the 'New-York Tribune' for the summers of 1888 to 1892, when Stephen was fired, looking for articles with a dateline from the wider base of New Jersey shore towns named in Townley Crane's prospectus. The Crane brothers' writing styles are widely divergent. Reading Townley's articles (written before Stephen began his journalistic career), it is evident that his style is that of brief, invariably flattering prose, while Stephen delighted in gleeful irony. This search revealed seventeen articles datelined from the shore towns of Long Branch, Belmar, Spring Lake and Sea Girt that appear to have the style of Stephen Crane. Hotel proprietors, baggage handlers and "summer maidens" are all written about with disdain. The articles are so stylistically distinctive in their irony and verbal inventiveness that they clearly look to be from Stephen's hand rather than from Townley's.

'Non-Traditional' Attribution: Stylometry

Stylometry provides an alternative and objective analysis. The stylometric task facing us was to examine the seventeen articles and attribute them to either Stephen or Townley Crane. Suitable control samples in more than one genre are required, so, within the genre of fiction, several textual samples of about 3,000 words were obtained from 'The Red Badge of Courage' and Joseph Conrad's 'The Nigger of the Narcissus', the latter being chosen because we know that Crane and Conrad read and admired each other's novels. For journalistic controls, we turned to Richard Harding Davis and Jacob Riis, who were, along with Crane, the most prominent American journalists of the 1890's. Examples of Stephen Crane's New Jersey shore reports, New York City journalism, and war correspondence were taken from the University of Virginia edition of Crane's work; samples of Townley Crane's journalism were taken from the 'New-York Tribune'. The seventeen anonymous articles were first merged, the resultant text then being split into two halves of approximately 1800 words each. The "Burrows" technique [3], which works with large sets of frequently occurring function words, is a proven and powerful tool in authorship attribution. Essentially it picks the N most common words in the corpus under investigation and computes the occurrence rate of these N words in each text or text-unit. Multivariate statistical techniques are then applied to the resultant data to look for patterns. The first phase in the investigation was designed to establish the validity of the Burrows technique on the known textual samples detailed above. Using principal components analysis, the Crane and Conrad fiction samples are clearly distinguishable from each other. Turning to the three genres within Crane's journalism, the principal components analysis on the occurrence rates of non-contextual function words shows, quite remarkably, how their rates of usage differ between his New York City, shore and war journalism, yet remain internally consistent within these genres. A final analysis incorporating the samples of journalistic writing from Townley Crane, Richard Harding Davis and Jacob Riis provides further validation of the Burrows method with a clear distinction visible between the shore journalism of Townley Crane and Stephen Crane. Discarding the control samples, which have served their purpose, we then focus on the main task, namely the attribution of the seventeen anonymous articles to either Stephen or Townley. Both cluster analysis and principal components analysis provide mutually supportive results in attributing the anonymous articles to the youthful ironist Stephen Crane. The "non-traditional" analysis has supplied objective, stylometric evidence which supports the "traditional" scholarship on the problem of authorship. We believe that this joint interdisciplinary approach should be the way in which attributional research is conducted.

References

1. Wertheim, S. and Sorrentino, P., eds. (1988). The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. 2 Vols. Columbia UP, New York.
2. Bowers, F. ed. (1973). Tales, Sketches and Reports. Vol. 8 of The University of Virginia Edition of the Works of Stephen Crane. UP of Virginia, Charlottesville.
3. Burrows, J. L. (1992). "Not Unless You Ask Nicely: The Interpretive Nexus Between Analysis and Information". Literary and Linguistic Computing, 7, pp. 91-109.