Stephen Crane's 75 page novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, introduces one of the most heartbreaking women in all of literature. "The girl,Maggie, blossomed in mud puddles. She grew to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl. None of the dirt of Rum Alley seemed to be in her veins."

I thought of Maggie when talking to others on site about the poet of the piers I recently wrote about. Maggie loves to escape the poverty, ugliness, drunkenness of the bowery by visiting Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Her capacity to appreciate beauty exceeds her surroundings but is limited by them, too. She becomes impressed by the gaudy trappings of bars and the burlesque and becomes smitten with a barkeeper in whom she invests heroic qualities that just are not there. Pete uses her and then abandons her.

Having brought shame to her family, she is tossed out onto the streets, where she must sell her beauty until she meets a most untimely death. In the end the dark forces of poverty engulf her.

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