... a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters. A detailed, nearly eight-hundred-page account...it seems motivated purely by a devotion to Crane’s writing ... Auster plainly loves Crane—and wants the reader to—for Crane’s own far-from-sweet sake. And Auster is right: Crane counts ... The book comes fully to life when it evokes the fabric of the Crane family in New Jersey ... Auster is often sharp-eyed and revealing about the details of Crane’s writing, as when he points out how much Crane’s tone of serene omniscience depends on the passive construction of his sentences. But when he implies that Crane is original because he summons up interior experience in the guise of exterior experience—makes a psychology by inspecting a perceptual field—he is a little wide of the mark ... Auster...is very good at picking out superb stuff from Crane’s mostly submerged journalism ... Crane...emerges from this book, as from his own, as the least phony great American writer who ever lived.
... a metabiography—a long rumination on a short existence and the many radiant texts it produced ... suffused by a melancholy over contingency, wistful wonder at what Crane might have accomplished had he lived to Auster’s age of 74 ... Much of Burning Boy takes the uninitiated reader through Crane’s novels, short stories, poems, and journalistic sketches. It quotes extensively from those works and will leave some readers sated but others eager to read Crane on their own. This is a writer’s book, and much of its interest lies in the opportunity to see how one brilliant writer responds to another ... Auster, who titled his 1982 memoir The Invention of Solitude, describes writers as 'the strangest, loneliest people on earth.' This generous book breaches that solitude.
Auster’s book is aimed...at civilians, so-called general readers, and he must think they have a lot of stamina. Burning Boy is seldom dull—it’s often thrilling, in fact, to see a contemporary American writer engage so deeply with one of his forebears—but it can be exhausting ... Auster...is an excellent reader, it turns out, alert to all the nuances and surprises of Crane’s style, but these lengthy passages of analysis inevitably slow the book down and can make you forget that Crane’s was a life lived at a hectic, almost frantic pace ... Auster is especially good on Crane’s last couple of years, which began with a sort of crackup ... Auster leaves you in no doubt about Crane’s genius ... I’m not sure, though, that Auster succeeds in expanding the list of essential Crane much beyond Red Badge and the pieces that are already in the anthologies ... the real news here—for me, anyway—is Crane’s newspaper and magazine journalism, which would be worth reading even if Crane had never written a word of fiction.
... a book as impassioned, unconventional and frustrating as its subject ... Auster delivers no new revelations or freshly unearthed documents that would argue for an update. The biographical portions of Burning Boy mainly tour regions already mapped by Sorrentino and other scholars ... Auster makes the case for his book’s existence, first, by his sheer enthusiasm for Crane ... The book’s heft is due to its second distinguishing quality: Auster’s close—very close—readings of Crane’s signature works ... Burning Boy is literary biography’s equivalent of a carpet store that brings the samples direct to your home ... The strategy often works: At its best, Burning Boy delivers the uncanny sense of simultaneously inhabiting Crane’s prose while reading about it. The book’s chief pleasure is the experience of a veteran novelist going deep on another fiction writer ...Burning Boy succeeds less as an argument for Crane’s canonization than as a showcase for how complicated canons can be ... Auster doesn’t overstate Crane’s talent. But he does want to keep underscoring it, over and over. In that regard, Burning Boy reads more like a poignant lament than a life.
Burning Boy is thorough in its research, yet hurtles forward in its often intense, often moving enthusiasm for the subject. This is not a scholar’s biography. It is a fine novelist’s plunge into the life and mind of another artist. Auster continually makes it clear that Crane’s art matters to him and his own work, and has something vivid and authentic, something vital to offer our current fraught moment, a moment marked by too much evasion of reality, and not nearly enough compassion.
... massively detailed ... Every serious reader still knows [Crane's] name, and yet, Auster suggests, few students now pick him up. Burning Boy hopes to change that, though I have to wonder if 783 pages about a man who died before he was thirty is the best way to do it. Auster notes that he doesn’t expect his readers to have ever 'read a word of Crane,' but anyone who finishes this book will have read quite a lot of them ... Some of Auster’s readings seem marvelous, showing exactly how Crane got a particular effect or the way a seemingly inconsequential detail pays off on a story’s last page. Others plod ... Auster relies on the earlier and generously credited scholarship of Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino ... Sorrentino’s biography remains the standard. His prose is drier than Auster’s, or maybe just tighter, and his judgments have a pith that Burning Boy lacks ... Auster is loose and baggy by comparison, yet there are compensations. He has the space to make the writer’s friends and especially Cora Crane into vivid presences, and he uses the memoirs those friends left behind to capture Crane’s life in mid-1890s New York.
Paul Auster has written some unexpected books before now...but none so surprising as this one ... One of the strong points of Burning Boy is Mr. Auster’s attention to domestic detail ... Crane as presented here is morally irreproachable (likewise Cora), his literary achievements beyond criticism ... The editors of a biography this long might have asked its author for at least a full bibliography, if not a chronology into the bargain. They might also have advised Mr. Auster that his 21st-century squirming over his hero’s occasional insensitivity toward black, American Indian and Semitic peoples is unnecessary. It is nonetheless surprising to recall that Crane’s novel of America’s Civil War includes a single passing reference to an African-American. There is much to enjoy in this tour of what John Berryman, in his penetrating short biography of 1950, called the 'majesty and trash' of Crane’s work—a phrase that can be applied equally to the life.
... although his narrative of Crane’s short and incredibly eventful life is very lively, far more lively than any previous life of this author, the book’s consistently strongest element is the one Auster himself has already touted: one writer dramatically encountering another writer at work on the page ... no matter what you might think of Auster’s own fiction, his reactions to Crane’s writings are invigoratingly thoughtful, the kind of genuine appraisals that will prompt even long-seasoned Crane aficionados to return to his work ... electrically honest stuff is the real heart of Burning Boy, the thing that makes it a curiously indispensable Stephen Crane biography, passionately different from anything else that’s appeared about this writer.
Paul Auster has composed this weighty biography, and it truly gives a deep dive into his life and work. Auster is an expert wordsmith, and his admiration for his subject is evident on every page.
Auster now proves to be an incandescent literary biographer. Deeply inspired and openly awed by the feverish genius... Auster offers 'nuts-and-bolts' analysis of and affectingly emotional appreciation for Crane’s genre-twisting newspaper sketches, audacious and indelible novels, 'infinitely strange' poems, and riveting short stories ... Auster writes with such enrapturing vibrancy, expertise, and empathy that his biography serves as an intensive course in attentive, inquisitive reading as well as a thrillingly insightful and resonant portrait of a young artist who wrestled with the endless perplexities of life and death.
Stephen Crane...cuts a dashing figure in this beguiling literary biography ... Auster intertwines the engrossing picaresque with probing interpretations of Crane’s works ... Auster’s sprawling narrative combines punchy writing and shrewd analysis with an exuberant passion for his subject. The result is a definitive biography of a great writer.
Throughout, Auster conveys a highly personal, idiosyncratic perspective on his subject and the biography form itself ... he exhaustively evaluates countless sources (primary and secondary) while probing and dissecting Crane’s writing. Auster’s in-depth exploration of major works like Red Badge is engrossing, as are most of his renderings of Crane’s life experiences ... However, when Auster applies his admittedly erudite methods to Crane’s lesser work and to tangential events, the narrative suffers from bloat. Running close to 800 pages, the book would have benefitted from streamlining. Essential for Crane scholars; less engaging for others.
