This is the On the Media Midweek podcast, I'm Michael Lohanger.

Last week, news broke that writer Paul Oster had died from complications related to lung cancer.

The New York Times called him, quote, the patron saint of literary Brooklyn.

Elsewhere, he was dubbed the Dean of Postmodernists.

He was the author of many, many novels, including the seminal New York trilogy, and he wrote

screenplays and memoirs and non-fiction, including Burning Boy, the life and work of

Stephen Crane. He was also a longtime friend of Brooke and her

husband Fred Kaplan. They lived a few blocks away from each other in their

Brooklyn neighborhood. And in November of 2021 Paul Oster walked over to Brooks' home studio to talk about Stephen Crane.

We've often practiced on this show the art of looking back to understand the present, especially the past that has been forgotten or nearly,

and those who explored it and defined it, likewise unremembered, like the writer Stephen Crane.

Born on the day of the dead and dead five months before his 29th birthday

Stephen Crane lived five months and five days into the 20th century. Undone by tuberculosis before he had a chance

to drive an automobile to watch a film projected

on a large screen or listen to a radio, a figure from the horse and buggy world who missed out on the future that was awaiting his peers.

That's acclaimed novelist Paul Oster reading from his new book of non-fiction Burning Boy, the life and work of Stephen Crane.

In it, he makes the case that not only did Crane miss out on his future, but we, his readers, missed out on the radical literature

he could have written, if only he'd lived longer.

Before his death in 1900, Crane found enduring critical acclaim and a mass audience with the red badge of courage,

a civil war novel he wrote at 23.

Not once does he name the war. Not once does he say what the war is about. The word

slavery is never mentioned. The name Abraham Lincoln is never mentioned. The name of not one general is ever mentioned. We don't even know where we are.

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