See also: Elaine Marshall, "Crane's 'The Monster' Seen in the Light of Robert Lewis's Lynching" Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Sep., 1996), pp. 205-224 Available on JSTOR (if your library subscribes to it) at http://www.jstor.org/ AbstractThis essay proposes as a source of Stephen Crane's novella "The Monster" his brother William Crane's attempt to prevent the 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis, a black man accused of rapin a white woman in Port Jervis, New York. William Crane's inquest account of this event shares imagistic and thematic details with his brother Stephen's story, details that suggests a more than coincidental relation between the two narratives. Among their similarities, both stories feature a black man whose face, covered by blood (in the lynching account) and by a "ruby-red" flowing substance (in "The Monster"), is made unrecognizable-a black man, moreover, deemed a "monster" by the community, at the mercy of a white crowd, among whom foremost a judge and a doctor feel a moral compulsion to attempt to save his life. Crane's fictional effacing of the Lewis lynching in "The Monster" may be attributable to his reticence to criticize his hometown openly for such a heinous act and to his own ambivalent racial attitudes-attitudes evident in Crane's alternations between stereotyping and humanizing Henry Johnson, the novella's literal "monster" and central African-American character. For other lynchings and other killings of African-Americans, see The Lynching Calendar at http://www.autopsis.org/foot/lynch.html [Not complete, nor completely reliable, but still useful. You can browse by names of the dead, dates by year, dates by days, and places of death by state.] Robert Lewis can be found on this calendar. Edward Knoblauch -----Original Message----- From: Kristopher Burrell [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 07:47 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [NYHIST-L] NYS Lynchings Hi David, A colleague fowarded this email to me about your project. I wrote a paper on the lynching of Bob Lewis in Port Jervis, NY in 1892. It is on sale at the Minisink Valley Historical Society. I believe the website is www.minisink.org. I hope the paper helps. Kris Burrell [log in to unmask] ------------------------------------------------------------ Do you Yahoo!? Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.