Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane

"The LA Times awards a number of book prizes every year. This year’s prize for biography went to a literary biography, American novelist Paul Auster’s Burning Boy, about the life and work of Stephen Crane. Crane is best known as the author of one of the most famous historical novels about the American Civil War: The Red Badge of Courag e, though he wrote prolifically throughout his short life, including a stint as a war correspondent in Cuba, covering the Spanish-American War. Crane died in 1900 aged just 28. Auster writes, “I come at it not as a specialist or a scholar but as an old writer in awe of a young writer’s genius. Having spent the past two years poring over every one of Crane’s work…I find myself just as fascinated by Crane’s frantic, contradictory life as by the work he left us.”"