Although he is best known for his memorable Civil War classic, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, it was on the Bowery that Stephen Crane got his "artistic education".

While most of his contemporaries were still courting the sentimental myths of the Romantic era, Crane was exploring firsthand the New York East Side slum world of vagrants, harlots and beggars.

His first novel, MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS, the tale of pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness, was such a sexually frank and realistic portrait of that world that the book had to be first provately printed. Not until three years later was it given official publication.

Despite the snarls of reviewers, the howls of Victorian outrage, Maggie not only survived but achieved enduring greatness.