When a slum novel lacked a happy ending-as with the seduction, betrayal, and death of the heroine in Edgar Fawcett's The Evil That Men Do (1889)-the ethical consequences of improper behavior were obvious. Townsend's A Daughter of the Tenements (1895), for example, the heroine, despite the foils of a villain and her impoverished life selling fruit on the streets, becomes a successful ballerina, inherits a fortune, and lives happily ever after with her husband. A dominant theme in the fiction, however, was rags to riches. Émile Zola had earlier depicted a naturalistic universe in Parisian life in L'Assommoir and Nana, and Americans were developing a growing fascination with, and fear of, slum life in urban tenements, as reflected in such sociological studies as the Reverend Thomas DeWitt Talmage's The Night Sides of City Life (1878) and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) and in the popularity of sentimental, melodramatic fiction like The Detective's Ward or, The Fortunes of a Bowery Girl (1871) and Orphan Nell, the Orange Girl or, The Lost Heiress (1880). Crane could have been influenced by the fictional and nonfictional treatments of tenement life in the late nineteenth century. Before 1893 his literary output had consisted of ephemeral journalistic pieces and an assortment of satires and burlesques written in what he later called his 'clever, Rudyard Kipling style' (Wertheim and Sorrentino, The Correspondence of Stephen Crane, p. It is unclear, however, what influenced Stephen Crane (1871–1900) to write a brutal account of an urban slum. Its depiction of a hostile, amoral universe, indifferent to the plight of its inhabitants, foreshadows the direction of much literary writing in America in the twentieth century.

Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) (1893, revised 1896) has long been considered a groundbreaking novel of American literary naturalism.

Crane maggie