Stephen Crane's "An Experiment in Misery”

This week, we look at a lesser-known work by a well-known writer, Stephen Crane. Unlike many writers, Crane lived some of his fiction before writing it.

Do you imagine writers as solitary, sedentary individuals emptying their teeming brains while sitting in a garret or a pasture?

Then you don't know Stephen Crane.

One of America's greatest writers was also one of its most active. His best-known short story, "The Open Boat," is based on his own experience of rowing for his life with three other men after a shipwreck off the coast of Florida.

In some cases, however, Crane did not wait for an inspiring (and harrowing) incident before writing a story. Sometimes he went out and deliberately lived an interesting experience so that he could write about it.

Crane was not the first or the last writer to generate — or find — material this way.  One of his contemporaries, Nellie Bly, set out on a ballyhooed trip around the world in 1889 (and outdid the fictional feat of Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days).  Some 80 years later, in a famous example of what has been called "participatory journalism," George Plimpton trained with a professional football team and wrote about the experience.  His book Paper Lion became a movie starring Alan Alda.

Crane's Experiment

Crane's experience fits squarely in this tradition.  His subject matter was misery, specifically the life of the poor living on the margins in New York City.  His account, "An Experiment in Misery," appeared in a publication called the New York Press in 1894.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Crane was writing, poverty was widespread in American cities such as New York and Chicago, thanks to the growth of industry in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.  Reporter Jacob Riis reported on this subject in an 1890 book with a familiar title: How the Other Half Lives.  About 15 years later, Upton Sinclair wrote about the horrendous living and working conditions endured by the men and women working in the vicinity of the stockyards in Chicago.  (For more on Sinclair and his novel, The Jungle, see the first three issues of Mind Travel from June 2025.)

Crane sets the scene for his account in the first few sentences of "An Experiment in Misery":

It was late at night, and a fine rain was swirling softly down, causing the pavements to glisten with hue of steel and blue and yellow in the rays of the innumerable lights. A youth was trudging slowly, without enthusiasm, with his hands buried deep in his trousers pockets, toward the downtown places where beds can be hired for coppers. He was clothed in an aged and tattered suit, and his derby was a marvel of dust-covered crown and torn rim. He was going forth to eat as the wanderer may eat, and sleep as the homeless sleep.

The "youth" is Crane himself, then in his early twenties.  If you have read much of Crane's fiction, the word "youth" here may sound familiar.  In some of his best-known work, Crane frequently referred to a central character with a generic phrase instead of a proper name.  In The Red Badge of Courage, he uses the "youth" to refer to his protagonist, Henry Fleming.  This approach to identifying a character can help to generalize the character's experience so that Crane's story becomes the story of a wide swath of humanity.

An Inside Look

The opening sentences of "An Experiment in Misery" capture Crane's appearance as he goes "undercover," but, more to the point, other parts of the account depict the living conditions endured by the actual people living without homes in New York. One particularly penetrating sentence connects these conditions, physical sensations, and emotional experience:

The sifting rain saturated the old velvet collar of his overcoat, and as the wet cloth pressed against his neck, he felt that there no longer could be pleasure in life.

That's vintage Stephen Crane, who looks beyond the surface of experience to the broader or deeper meanings underneath. Another passage literally exposes a hidden truth. Describing men he saw in a shelter, Crane writes:

A few were parading in unconcerned nakedness. Here and there were men of brawn, whose skins shone clear and ruddy. They took splendid poses, standing massively like chiefs. When they had dressed in their ungainly garments there was an extraordinary change. They then showed bumps and deficiencies of all kinds.

We typically think of clothes as adornment, but the "ungainly garments" that these men wear make them look worse than they are. Their true selves, on some level, are visible only when their clothes do not hide them.

Crane makes these observations of his fellow men from the perspective of someone inside the shelter with them. It's hard to imagine he would have been able to secure such insights had he not taken on the identity of a fellow sufferer.

One of Them

What is more significant, however, is the personal perspective he is able to achieve by being one of these men, if only for a day. He writes:

The roar of the city in his ear was to him the confusion of strange tongues, babbling heedlessly; it was the clink of coin, the voice of the city's hopes which were to him no hopes.

Indeed, the youth recognizes "his infinite distance from all that he valued." Crane writes, "Social position, comfort, the pleasures of living, were unconquerable kingdoms. He felt a sudden awe." Such awe is possible only because the youth is on the outside looking in, observing "comfort" and "the pleasures of living" from the perspective of one who does not — and cannot — feel them.

Remarking on the value of Crane's "insider" perspective, scholar Glen Johnson observes:

The idea is gimmicky, but the story is not, largely because Crane focuses intently on the youth's psychology and presents the reality of slum experience as it is discovered within a man living it.

"An Experiment in Misery" exposes more than the lives of the poor; it also takes on the larger system in which these people live, issuing this critique in an objective, matter-of-fact tone typical of Crane:

And in the background a multitude of buildings, of pitiless hues and sternly high, were to him emblematic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may flounder at its feet.

Our Own Chance to See and Understand

We all are surrounded by countless situations, emotions, and experiences that are not our own. Most of the time we must settle for observations made from a distance — observations bound to be incomplete or even inaccurate. Crane overcame this distance — to some degree anyway — by entering the world he sought to understand, by taking on the perspective of someone experiencing this world firsthand, by becoming one of the "wretches" at the feet of the nation.

Most of us are not ready to go to these lengths, but we can do something to broaden and deepen our understanding. By reading the works of Crane, Sinclair, and others, we can seize the opportunity to learn and to feel through books.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away . . ." I agree, and I think books can do even more, taking us not only to other "Lands," but also into the bodies and minds of our fellow human beings.