Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

Written when Crane was 22 years old, this classic of American literary naturalism and realism recounts the story of a doomed young woman from the Bowery tenements.

Acclaimed by critic Alfred Kazin as "a powerful, severe, and harshly comic portrayal of Irish immigrant life in lower New York," it offers an unsparing depiction of the poverty, crime, and hopelessness of nineteenth-century slum life.