The Open Boat and Other Stories

Four men from the sunk steamer Commodore in a dinghy off the Florida coast, told, as Crane's own subtitle has it, after the fact. He had been one of the four, thirty hours in that boat, and wrote the newspaper report first and this afterwards. Around it stand the other late stories, among them the ones he brought back from the Greco-Turkish war he had gone to watch. Fifty-six plates of sea painting, from Winslow Homer's dories to Ivan Aivazovsky's stormy seas, run through the volume and hold Crane's thirty hours in open water in their own element.