"About this period her brother remarked to her: 'Mag, I'll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh've edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!' Where upon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell."
From my TBR List I picked Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction by Stephen Crane. I read quite of bit of Stephen Crane in college when I was studying American Literature. Maggie was a new one for me and an interesting read. Apparently it was too risque for its time and Crane published it himself under a pseudonym. After he became famous for The Red Badge of Courage, his publisher asked him to clean up the language in Maggie and they published it. Mostly he took out a lot of "damns."
My version was the original. The damns didn't bother me, but the dialogue was hard to follow at times. It's definitely a story from the streets of New York. I had read most of the short stories in this volume. I even remember writing a long paper on the symbolism in "The Open Boat."
But if you want to read something representative of Stephen Crane, you really should just read his classic, A Red Badge of Courage.
Learn more about Stephen Crane here.
"Where upon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell" is a brilliant line! Love it!
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