Spotlight on Achievement
Paul Sorrentino
Paul Sorrentino won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to write a biography of Stephen Crane. In 2006, he received Commonwealth of Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award, and he has won numerous university awards for teaching.
A Literary Adventurer
by Don Rude
In 2008, Professor Paul Sorrentino received a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the highest honors given to American scholars and researchers, to complete a long-planned biography of the late nineteenth-century American author Stephen Crane. Arriving at the destination of the biography has followed a 30-year adventure, with travel, detective work, and a few surprises.
The adventure begins in high school
When recently asked about his interest in Crane, Dr. Sorrentino smiled and observed that it could be characterized by one word: “irony.” It began in a high school English class during which students were required to read one novel a month from a list and to take an oral exam on their selection. After he reported on Sinclair Lewis’s 450-page novel Main Street, the only book on the list that he could find, the teacher glanced out the window and pronounced the grade, “75.” When a classmate following him emerged with a score of 92, Sorrentino asked what book he had read and was told The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane. Immediately noticing that the book was only 150 pages long, Sorrentino decided that he could achieve a higher score if he reported on a shorter book. When he also got a 92 on The Red Badge the following month even though he disliked it, he was convinced that shorter was better.
Are there shortcuts in scholarship?
Sorrentino forgot about Crane until he came to Virginia Tech in 1978, having recently received his Ph.D. in English from Penn State. Looking for a research topic that could be done quickly and help him get tenure, he decided to write a biography of someone who had not lived long. Glancing at an alphabetical list of American authors, he stumbled upon “Crane, Stephen; died at age 28” and immediately thought, “maybe shorter will be better once again.”
He was in for a surprise! Thirty years later, he is only beginning to write the biography, but along the way he has led the life of a literary adventurer.
Adventures in Hawaii
Among Sorrentino’s accomplishments is his unearthing the massive research collection of the late Commander Melvin H. Schoberlin, USN. Though Commander Schoberlin had claimed from the 1940s until his death in 1977 that he had the largest private Crane collection—containing scores of unpublished letters, manuscripts, and other valuable documents—he chose not to share the material with other scholars because he had hoped to use it for a new Crane biography. Sorrentino spent several years tracking down the collection, which had ended up in Hawaii, and eventually received permission from Mrs. Schoberlin to examine it. Though Sorrentino’s discovery attracted national attention, his personal memories capture the excitement of the search. These memories include the approval of Mrs. Schoberlin’s two huge dogs—he was the first visitor, according to her, they had not tried to bite—as they rested their heads on his knees while he examined priceless documents; the discovery that he was stranded in Hawaii when a thief broke into his room, stole his plane ticket, and canceled his flight back to Blacksburg; and Commander Schoberlin’s note he found buried in the collection: “one day a young scholar will come to examine my collection. Perhaps he will finish my biography.” When Sorrentino showed the note to Mrs. Schoberlin, tears filled her eyes as she said, “You’re the one.”
Discovering a fraud
The discovery of the Schoberlin collection was one reason why Sorrentino and another Crane scholar, Professor Stanley Wertheim of William Paterson University, co-edited a new, two-volume collection of Crane’s correspondence (1988). While working on the project, they made an important discovery that has altered American literary history. For decades Thomas Beer’s influential biography of Crane was the only source for many of Crane’s letters and incidents in his life. Sorrentino and Wertheim discovered, however, that Beer had altered the chronology of Crane's life, invented anecdotes, suppressed information about Crane’s love affairs, and composed many of Crane's letters himself. As a result, scholars have unknowingly relied on fabricated documents and falsified evidence. The damage from Beer’s widely influential work, though, has gone beyond the study of Crane and has, like a computer virus, also infected literary histories of the 1890s as well as biographies of such important figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and William Dean Howells.
The adventure continues
Sorrentino’s research and discoveries have led to other books on Crane—including The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane 1871-1900 (1994), which he co-authored with Wertheim. In addition, he founded the Stephen Crane Society and is the editor of its journal; has been featured on NPR’s show “All Things Considered”; has been a guest speaker here and abroad; and has served as a literary consultant for The New Yorker, National Gallery of Art, CNN, A&E Network, and BBC-TV. A winner of a number of major teaching awards, in 2006 he received from the Governor of Virginia the highest honor awarded to faculty in the state, the Commonwealth of Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award.
Harvard University Press will publish Sorrentino’s Crane biography in a few years; but this spring they will publish his new edition of The Red Badge of Courage. How ironic that a book he disliked and read only because of its length should now be associated with him. Perhaps shorter was better after all.