[2] After Crane finished George's Mother, he wrote to fellow writer Hamlin Garland, triumphantly: "I have just completed a New York book that leaves Maggie at the post.

[3] Critics of the time, however, were less impressed; Harry Thurston Peck wrote that Crane should not "ask us to accept his old bones and junk as virgin gold."

The book was also criticized, like Maggie, for its frank depictions of vice; the sentence "for he had known women of the city's painted legions" was removed from a draft.

[4] One champion of the book, however, was Crane's mentor William Dean Howells, who praised what he called its "mastery" and "extraordinary insight.

George is an immature man inclined toward melodrama, and his mother constantly berates him in an attempt to make him change his ways, telling him to get a job and go to church.