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Burning Boy

The Life and Work of Stephen Crane

by Paul Auster

Narrator Paul Auster

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Length 35 hours 48 minutes

Language English

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“Burning Boy is Paul Auster's tour-de-force examination of the life and writings of Stephen Crane, an exhaustive biography that is among the very best I have ever read. It is massive, requiring patience and time to follow the trail Auster leads one down, but the rewards and riches at the end are well worth the effort. It works as a piece of literature unto itself; the writing is that good (and if you get the audiobook, Auster reads it himself). It's like your very best professor giving a master class on this writer, who has fallen from popular notice in America. The chapter by chapter and story by story examinations of Crane's novels, poems, and stories is enthralling, placing each tale in a specific time and place in history as well as in Crane's brief lifetime. But it isn't just his writing that is fascinating. Crane was shipwrecked, travelled the country and the world, became friends with luminaries of the time, fought for workers' rights and women's rights as well as marrying a sex worker and becoming a journalist in the Spanish American war. And he died at the age of 28. This is a great book for literary readers of fiction or biography. ”
— William • An Unlikely Story

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

This program is read by the author.

Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster's comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane.

With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight.

Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death.

In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive listen about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of listening experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.

A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company

Biography & Memoir History Nonfiction

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Bloodbath Nation, Baumgartner, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He was also a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). Auster was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age seventy-seven in 2024.