Maggie

A girl grows up in a Bowery tenement between a drunken mother and a brother who fights for standing, meets a bartender with a good coat, and is finished off by the respectability of everyone around her. Crane was twenty-one and could not place it; he printed it himself under a false name and could not sell that either. It is one of the first American novels to look straight at the slums without arranging a moral at the end. Fifty plates by Courbet and Daumier and their contemporaries follow the same streets, markets, and working women Crane put on the page.