Written when Crane was 22 years old, this classic of American literary naturalism and realism recounts the story of a doomed young woman from the Bowery tenements. Acclaimed by critic Alfred Kazin as "a powerful, severe, and harshly comic portrayal of Irish immigrant life in lower New York," it offers an unsparing depiction of the poverty, crime, and hopelessness of nineteenth-century slum life.

This edition follows the text of the first edition, which Crane self-published in 1893 under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. The second edition was published by D. Appleton & Company three years later, following the great success of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. The later edition incorporated changes and revisions intended by the publisher to make the text palatable for a general audience, softening and weakening Crane's representation of the forceful everyday language that he heard on the streets of New York. The text of this edition presents Maggie: A Girl of the Streets as Crane wrote it.