Vain, pushing, pretentious and unquestionably naive, Stephen Crane emerges from the collected letters as something less than one's idea of a literary genius. As Professor Stallman says in his introduction, the letters do give us “a new perspective” on Crane. Artists are notoriously self-contradictory, Professor Stallman tells us; but there is something disturbing about the contradictoriness of these letters, where Crane says one thing to one friend and something very different to another, makes high claims for himself in one letter and low ones in the next. The letters, indeed, tempt the reader to make an overall hypothesis about them; they may have the variousness of the complicated mind that makes an interesting personality (Stallman's reading of the case) or they may be the letters of a man whose largest aim in life was to dramatize himself and to impress others. He says in one letter (to John Northern Hilliard):