Stephen Crane's career was so brief and his fiction so vibrant and complex that scholars have tended to hunt for a single thematic or stylistic key to his work. In the thirteen essays collected here, Donald Pizer draws on decades of his own work on Crane to argue instead that Crane's fiction demonstrates a fundamental instability and that the nature and quality of any one of his works can best be understood by viewing it in relation to Crane's own shifting and developing ideas.