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    The Open Boat: Short Story
    The Open Boat: Short Story
    The Open Boat: Short Story
    Ebook40 pages51 minutes

    The Open Boat: Short Story

    By Stephen Crane

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    About this ebook

    Following a shipwreck, four survivors are adrift in a leaking dinghy—The Open Boat. The captain is hurt but still able to lead, the cook keeps the boat afloat by bailing, and the correspondent and the oiler—a man whose job it is to oil machinery—take turns rowing. At first, angry at their situation and inclined to bicker, the men ultimately form bonds of empathy and, united, struggle to survive.

    Based on author Stephen Crane’s own experience of shipwreck off the coast of Florida in 1897, “The Open Boat” is considered by many to be his greatest work and the model of literary Naturalism.

    HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 10, 2014
    ISBN9781443435215
    The Open Boat: Short Story
    Author

    Stephen Crane

    Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was an American poet and author. Along with his literary work, Crane was a journalist, working as a war correspondent in both Cuba and Greece. Though he lived a short life, passing away due to illness at age twenty-eight, Crane’s literary work was both prolific and highly celebrated. Credited to creating one of the earliest examples of American Naturalism, Crane wrote many Realist works and decorated his prose and poetry with intricate and vivid detail.

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      Book preview

      The Open Boat - Stephen Crane

      The Open Boat

      A Tale Intended to be After the Fact. Being the Experience of Four Men from the Sunk Steamer Commodore.

      I

      None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.

      The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: Gawd! That was a narrow clip. As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea.

      The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.

      The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there.

      The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy-nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he commanded for a day or a decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the greys of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a topmast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was, deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.

      Keep ’er a little more south, Billie, said he.

      ‘A little more south,’ sir, said the oiler in the stern.

      A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking bronco, and by the same token, a bronco is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over

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