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With its unflinching portrayal of the squalor and brutality of turn-of-the-century New York, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets produced a scandal when it was first published in 1893. Crane's novel chronicles the life of Maggie Johnson, the daughter of a cruel father and drunken mother, who finds work in a collar factor and is seduced by her brother's menacing friend, Pete. Disowned by her mother, Maggie becomes a prostitute and, ultimately, a victim of despair. But more than the tale of a young woman's tragic fall, the novel is also a powerful exploration of the destructive forces that underlie urban society and human nature.

This volume also includes "George's Mother" and eleven other tales and sketches of New York written between 1892 and 1896. Together in their poised realism these tales confirm Crane's place as the first modern American writer.

"A powerful, severe, and harshly comic portrayal of Irish immigrant life in lower New York exactly a century ago."--Alfred Kazin