Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Other New York Writings (Modern Library Classics)

This book arrived in sad shape, but why not for the price. It was covered with stickers from a campus book store with creases front and back. Fortunately, the stickers peeled off easily and I filled in the creases with matching magic markers. The cover photograph was taken at Orchard and Henry street about 1910. See if you can spot the street sign now clearly visible on my bargain copy.Inside, the story is just as painful. There's no one to heal the wounds of the female protagonist. Locked in by gender and poverty in turn of the 20th century Lower East Side, her Irish family barely lives above subsistence. Her older brother, hardly a model of sobriety or morals, drags her behind him into her own toxic relationship with no way out. Written in dialect I didn't recognize as Irish at first, this reader wonders how any women could climb out of her station in life so stricken by birth, ethnicity, and poverty.

These stories are tough for the modern reader. They unfold at a slower pace, and the dated vocabulary might be distracting in print. It's the amazing performance of Dick Hill that breathes life into the stories on this recording. He has carefully analyzed each one and fills the simple, sometimes repetitive dialogue with emotions that the first time reader would probably overlook. His voice is so flexible that you often forget there is only one reader. I have two of these stories on other recorded books, but I believe his interpretation is most true to the author's intentions and certainly the most entertaining.Bravo and thank you Dick Hill!

I've often found it compared to Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" but in truth Crane's version of the idealistic star-struck young girl who falls in love with a man and then has her own metaphorical fall is far better. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets is a much more succinct, gritty and pointedly realistic story about a young girl in a poverty stricken New York that falls in love before being cast out by her hypocritical family and left to die on the streets. I feel like most people read Stephen Crane for the Red Badge of Courage but you can find many of the same themes here.

I bought this for an English class-- I just needed "Maggie." However, after finishing it I was so impressed with Crane's writing ability that I finished the rest of the stories. These are great pieces of realism that are quick reads and still hold up today. Treat yourself to this amazing collection and enjoy the works of one of the greatest American writers of all time!

This isn't the exact edition I read. My favorite of all the stories was the last one "The Monster" about a man who heroically rescues a child, but ends up disfigured.

I found this book well written and expresses a time period and era that was challenging very well

Sorry I read it

this collection is invaluable. I recommend it to anyone interested in American literature and intellectual thought around the turn of the century.