Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.
Stephen Crane is probably best known for his American Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a story of the reactions of an inexperienced soldier to the horrors of war. He, however, was chiefly a writer of short stories, the most noteworthy (值得注意的）of which are "The Blue Hold," "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," and "The Open Boat."
Crane lived during the last three decades of the nineteenth century and, like many artists of his time, rejected traditional, romantic themes and wrote about what he saw around him in the most realistic terms—the cruel and violent, as well as the gentle and humorous.
Robert E. Spiller, one of America's leading literary historians, believes that modern American fiction was born with Stephen Crane's work. Though the total volume of his work may be too slender (不足的）to qualify him as a first-rate writer, he is still an important figure in the American fiction of the nineteenth century.
Son of a Methodist minister, Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of 14 children. His childhood was a happy one. In school, he was more interested in baseball than in his studies, and at one time he considered becoming a professional ball player. But the career of a writer was his natural choice, and after two years of college, he went to New York to write. There he lived for five hard years, enduring much illness and achieving no success in his work.
In New York, Crane made a small amount of money by writing for newspapers, but his real writing at this time was his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Unlike other writers who sentimentalized (情绪化）or moralized about what they saw, Crane accurately told of the cruelty and poverty of city life. He published Maggie at his own expense, but it did not sell well. At that time, the story was considered so shockingly realistic that the publisher refused to identify himself with the book.
Meanwhile, half-starved and often ill, Crane continued to write. He completed The Red Badge of Courage in 1893 when he was only 22 years old. It was published two years later and quickly became a best-seller. Suddenly Crane found himself a famous young man. Unfortunately, he made only $100 from the book. All his writings cannot, of course, be considered equally good. But Crane's vivid impressions of life, his keen insight, and his fine distinctive style, colorful and forceful, provided a pattern for later writers. He gave the naturalistic fiction the characteristic form which was later used by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and a host of others.
man who helped the patriots in the American Revolution.