Hotel de Dream: A New York Novel – A Brilliant Historical Novel of Forbidden Love and Tragic Passion in 1890s Manhattan

Edmund White, gratefully, is a prolific writer, a gifted man of letters who has become one of America's more important authors. While much of Edmund White's oeuvre is about gay life, he does not confine his talent to the one topic: he is a brilliant biographer, a fine man of research, and a poet with prose. HOTEL DE DREAM: A New York Novel is his latest foray into fictional biography and for this reader the book succeeds on every level. The short novel is ostensibly a 'biographical' account of the sadly brief life of novelist Stephen Crane, a nineteenth century literary giant who is best known for THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, but who also wrote a few other short novels and story collections. Basing the concept of this novel on both fact and fantasy, Edmund White gives us the last days of Stephen Crane's life, a tortured existence as he succumbed to tuberculosis, nursed by his beloved mistress Cora, an ex-Madame who had run a bordello in Florida called the Hotel de Dream. Crane had in fact befriended a poor youth who happened to be a male prostitute infected with syphilis: White takes this fact and uses it as a unique approach to explore the mind of Crane, using the fragment of thought that Crane was planning to create a story 'Flowers of Asphalt' based on the sad lad as the impetus for this brilliant book, the composition of a final novel called 'The Painted Boy.' The novel deals with myriad aspects of Crane's life, but in the end it focuses on Crane dictating to Cora a…

This book contains a short novel within a short novel. The stories overlap and intersect as the dying Stephen Crane dictates the story of a male hustler to his wife as his health deteriorates from end-stage TB. The entire story is built on known facts about Stephen Crane and his wife, Cora, a former whore-house owner in Jacksonville Florida. The house of prostitution was named Hotel de Dream, from which the novel gets its name. However, the shifting of Stephen Crane's consciousness as he dictates the novel to Cora is dream-like in its mixture of reality and fantasy. The Cranes leave Sussex England and make it to the Black Forest in Germany in a last-ditch effort to find a miracle cure for Crane's TB. The love and devotion of Cora Crane to her common-law husband Stephen is mirrored in the love affair between a married business man and a young street male prostitute. In both stories we see devotion pushed to the limits. White bases the novel on the claims that Crane was writing or had written significant portions of a novel about a male prostitute but had been convinced to destroy the document as socially unacceptable, or at least the document may have been destroyed by his colleagues. White also bases the story on Crane's experiences as a journalist and foreign correspondent and development of stories from original sources. Therefore the story of Elliot the male prostitute is mirrored by an interview Crane held with a male prostitute, also named Elliot, for background…