Boy of the streets

Hotel de Dream
by Edmund White

Seven years before his untimely death from consumption at the age of 28, Stephen Crane published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It was 1893 and the time was out of joint for a grimly realistic fictionalisation of the life of a prostitute. Nineteenth-century sensibilities recoiled. Crane enjoyed a succès de scandale, and established himself at the forefront of American literary modernism.

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Fellow American author Edmund White — himself no stranger to the succès de scandale — has chosen Stephen Crane as the subject of his new novel. Crane is a cultish writer, largely unknown to British readers. In White’s hands, depicted at the very end of his life, he is a figure of desperate pathos who nevertheless fails fully to engage our sympathies.

White describes Hotel de Dream as a ‘fantasia on real themes’.