The Open Boat and Other Stories

Stephen Crane turns his own shipwreck off the Florida coast into some of the sharpest short fiction in American literature.

At a glance Spare, salt-stung stories about small men against an indifferent sea, sky, and frontier. Four men in a boat scarcely bigger than a bathtub, rowing against a grey Atlantic that… Crane writes as though every wave were being counted and every hope quietly audited, and… What it's about The centrepiece, The Open Boat, follows the survivors of a foundered…

The centrepiece, The Open Boat, follows the survivors of a foundered ship as they take turns at the oars and measure their chances against wind, current, and the maddening nearness of an unreachable shore.