Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, the great novel of Civil War combat, without ever having seen a battle. His poetry was even stranger for its time: The Black Riders (1895) is a book of tiny, unrhymed, flint-hard parables that baffled the 1890s and reads like twentieth-century poetry arrived decades early.

In "A Man Said to the Universe," the universe replies that the man's existence "has not created in me / A sense of obligation" — cosmic indifference delivered with a shrug. Crane lived as recklessly as he wrote, working as a war correspondent and surviving a shipwreck, and died of tuberculosis in Germany at 28.