Stephen Crane

It was Wednesday, April 12, 1961, and I stood in my gym shorts on the Costa Mesa High School athletic field. What could possibly cause me to recall such a trifling memory 50 years later? I remember that day because of a historic milestone associated...

May the Tiki gods smile on Chris Jepsen tonight when he takes the stage at Don the Beachcomber (formerly Sam's Seafood) amid waterfalls and carved island statues. After all, it's like a dream come true for the Huntington Beach native, whose passion...

Stephen Crane: "An Experiment in Misery" (HarperPerennial) "The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then,...

Sometimes as the sun slowly fades over the horizon, Thomas Taylor climbs to the top of the Ponce de Leon Inlet Lighthouse and marvels at the view of Daytona Beach to the north. He leans against the iron railing and gazes at the ships on the Atlantic...

By Richard Rayner * "Summer up here in the north is beautiful," my Finnish father-in-law once said. "Last year it was on a Thursday." The great Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness develops this idea in his masterwork, "Independent People": "They stood in...

The Spanish-American War, which officially began on this date, was a short and thoroughly lopsided affair, but it was long on enthusiasm and colorful characters. Future president Teddy Roosevelt led a charge of cowboys and college students up a hill in...

By Art Winslow In his brief history-cum-memoir of the American infantry in Europe late in World War II, "The Boys' Crusade" (titled for the youthfulness of the soldiers), historian Paul Fussell outlines a situation in which the Allied ground army grew...

Though Israel boasts a rich and vibrant literary culture and has been almost continuously at war since its founding, none of its writers -- many of them veterans -- heretofore have produced a defining novel of men in combat. Ron Leshem's evocative,...

In 1893, a year before the publication of his Civil War classic "The Red Badge of Courage," author Stephen Crane self-published a pulpy novella called "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets." It's the literary equivalent of drinking a boilermaker: pungent, frothy...

There are marvelous places in Florida where you can touch history -- where you can smell it, sense it, walk around in it. They are places that reward you with a sense of what life or a particular moment must have been like for those who shaped the...

I am standing on the bank of Mosquito Lagoon, contemplating fragments of clam shells strewn along the shoreline at the foot of the historic Eldora State House's front veranda. "Looks like a school of fish coming in," someone close by says, pointing out...