I'm 17 and I was planning on reading it for class, do you think it will be easy to read?
Stephen Crane, Maggie is fantastic! I read it in school when I was 14 so I have no doubt you will have no problems in reading it. Maggie is the tale of an inevitable fall from grace on the part of a young, innocent girl trapped in the vicious world of New York City's slums. Yearning for acceptance and love, beaten at home by alcoholic parents, Maggie sets out with Pete, a local bartender whose cultured mannerisms elicit great respect from the impressionable young girl. However, when Pete spurns her for another, Maggie is ejected out onto the street, forced into prostitution to make a living. We last see her moving off, a huge, oily fat man in tow, for a darkened corner in the city's seedy underworld. If Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a torrent of social anger and protest, Crane's Maggie is like a brilliant lightning strike, flashing across our vision and leaving us temporarily blinded. The book--scarcely 70 pages--is succint, brutish, and merciless. Crane allows his readers to form their own opinions regarding the characters. His innovative use of near-phonetic spelling to depict in the reader's ear the local dialect of New York's rough neighborhoods was shocking and difficult to comprehend when the book was first released. It lends Maggie an air of earthy legitimacy. Ultimately, Maggie is a cry for the plight of poor children--the souls we overlook with a callous unease mirrored in Pete's offhand, uncaring rejection of young Maggie's genuine love and affection. It is, without qualification, Stephen Crane's greatest and most moving achievement.
