Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

This book took me about an hour to read, and you know what? It was an hour more than I should have spent with this book.

Yeah, yeah, Stephen Crane is an important realist, and his vernacular and depiction of life in the slums is important--not only from a literary but from a historic point of view.

But holy cow this was boring. No one is developed enough to be interesting, it's predictably melodramatic, and it's done better and more interestingly a few years (decades?) later by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle and probably other authors I can't recall.

The book does have some unintended comedy based on its out-of-datedness, but still. Skip it, unless there's a pressing reason not to. Is The Red Badge of Courage any better?