 The Monster was Crane 's first story to feature the fictional town of Whilomville ; it would eventually serve as the setting of 14 stories , 13 of which would appear in the 1900 anthology Whilomville Stories . The town was based on Port Jervis , New York , where the author lived from the age of six to eleven . Although Crane and his mother relocated to Asbury Park , New Jersey , in 1880 , until 1896 he frequently stayed with his older brother and Port Jervis resident William Howe Crane . Crane admitted to his publishers that while he readily used Port Jervis as inspiration while writing The Monster , he was anxious to ensure that the residents of his previous hometown did not recognize themselves in the fictional Whilomville . While Crane biographer Thomas Beer claimed to trace the prototype of Henry Johnson to a Port Jervis teamster named Levi Hume , Crane 's niece , Edna Crane Sidbury , believed the character and his disfigurement were influenced by a local waste collector whose face was damaged by cancer . In Black Frankenstein : The Making of an American Metaphor , author Elizabeth Young theorized that Crane may also have been inspired by popular freak show attractions such as Zip the Pinhead , whose real name was William Henry Johnson , and Joseph Merrick , the Elephant Man . It is also possible that Crane found thematic inspiration in Henrik Ibsen 's An Enemy of the People ; although first published in 1882 , the play — about a physician who finds himself ostracized by his community — first became popular in the United States in the mid @-@ 1890s . 
