The front cover of Adrian Hunter's excellent new edition of Maggie is too modest; this is a book that not only contains the first (1893) edition of the novella, but also includes four other examples of Crane's New York writing (George's Mother, An Experiment in Misery, An Experiment in Luxury and An Ominous Baby) and plenty more. There are extracts from contemporaneous slum and reform literature (Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Thomas De Witt Talmage's Night Scenes of City Life and Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York), as well as a selection of Crane's letters and criticism, examples of the New Journalism of the late nineteenth century, early reviews of Maggie and a useful bibliography. In all, it is clear that this is an edition designed for the classroom, although this supplementary material would also be of interest to readers discovering Crane for the first time.

Hunter's introduction is thorough rather than original. Following an appropriately concise description of Crane's compact and deceptively straightforward prose, he provides an account of the book's prehistory that incorporates both Crane's own arrival in New York and a more detailed look at links between Maggie and Riis's How the Other Half Lives. This is, of course, well-trodden ground for Crane scholars, but Hunter covers it effectively. His treatment of how best to classify Maggie generically is less convincing; the debate over whether Crane is realist, naturalist, modernist, impressionist, etc. is – as Hunter points out – contentious and my feeling is that he spends a little too long in arriving at a definition of Crane that collapses distinctions between journalism and fiction-writing too readily.

That said, there is no doubt that Hunter grasps much of what it is that can make Crane's writing so exhilarating and challenging to the reader. Following the trend of other recent editions, he reprints the 1893 text rather than the sanitized and vastly inferior version published to capitalize on the success of The Red Badge of Courage. Although I suspect that new readers would have liked to learn more about the differences between the two editions (and the reasons for the changes), this is not to denigrate Hunter's efforts. I have no qualms about recommending this is a classroom edition.