Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

The first social expose in fiction to render ‘how the other half lives,’ Stephen Crane’s Maggie is one of the most powerful depictions of the urban poor of its time. As a reviewer stated shortly after the work’s appearance in 1893: ‘ Maggie is a study of life in the slums of New York, and of the hopeless struggle of a girl against the horrible conditions of her environment; and so bitter is the struggle, so black the environment, so inevitable is the end, that the reader feels a chill at his heart’.