Plot Summary of Maggie: a Girl of The Streets by Stephen Crane

The novel opens with a fight happening amongst a boys from Devil’s Row and Rum Alley, two different parts of town. A young boy named Jimmie is in the center of the fight, and he is one if the main characters in the novel. While he is fighting, a boy named Pete approaches and saves him from the other boys, who surely would have beaten Jimmie to death when given the opportunity.

Soon after, Jimmie gets into another fight, this time broken up by his father, whose influence on Jimmie shapes the person that he becomes. His father forces him home, and we are introduced to Tommie and Maggie, who are Jimmie’s younger siblings. Mary, the mother, soon comes into the scene as well. She is a raging alcoholic which in turn has made her not only a hateful and abusive person, but also terrifying to be around much less live with. Everyone in the family fears her, and her abusive behavior is so bad that it causes her children to hide in corners whenever she is in one of her states. Even minor things, such as when Maggie accidentally broke a plate while washing the dishes, causes Mary to react in an extremely violent manner. Things get so bad that night that Jimmie had to ask the old lady that lived in the floor above them if he could stay the night, which was not uncommon for him to do. She told him that she would allow him to stay with her for the night if he went down to the bar and bought her a beer, but to his surprise he finds his father there, who takes the beer.

When Jimmie returns home the next day, he finds his parents laying the floor, obviously having gotten into another horrific fight the night before. Time passes, and Tommie and the father die. Maggie has grown into a pretty, level-headed girl, despite her home life. Jimmie on the other hand takes after his father and becomes a mean, nasty man, with no real purpose to live. Maggie gets a job at a collar and cuff factory, where she works full-time. Pete, now a full-grown, wealthy man, comes back into Maggie’s life and the two begin to date. He takes her to many events that she wouldn’t be able to see otherwise. A little later, a night comes when a bar refuses service to Mary, and she comes home in a rage. She takes her extreme anger out on Maggie by cursing her and calling her horrific names, and she ends up leaving with Pete. The night after, Jimmie overhears from a woman that the old lady overheard Maggie asking Pete if he loved her. He is enraged by this, and he is determined to find Pete so that he can hurt him, so he and his friend find Pete one night at a bar that he works at, and they get into a big fight. This results in the arrests of Pete and Jimmie’s friend. Three weeks later, Maggie and Pete are at another bar, and Pete’s old friend, Nellie, shows up with her date. The two reconnect and begin to flirt, and they eventually leave together, so Maggie goes home.

When she arrives, her mother wastes no time in ridiculing her and reminding her of what a terrible person she is. Mary humiliates her in front of all of the neighbors and treats her as if she has some kind of disease. More time passes, and Maggie goes to Pete while he is working in the bar, but he tells her to “go to hell”. She walks down the streets, rejected by almost everyone, and eventually ends up by a dark river, and the chapter ends abruptly. Next we are taken to on of the final scenes where Pete is in a bar surrounded by girls, including Nellie. He is very drunk, and as a result he is buying lots of drinks and saying that he’s having a “helluva time” with them. He finally passes out, but not before telling Nellie that he is “stuck on her”. After this the girls leave him and Nellie walks out, calling him a fool. Finally, we hear news that Maggie has died, and we suddenly see sympathy coming from Mary for the first time in the entirety of the novel.