Fiction · 1895
The Red Badge of Courage
An Episode of the American Civil War
Henry Fleming, a young Union private, goes into his first battle expecting heroism and runs. Stephen Crane, who was twenty-three and had never seen a war, published the novel in 1895; veterans believed he must have fought. Its close attention to what fear and noise and smoke actually feel like made it the first modern war novel in English.
Crane never names the battle, and the reader is told no more than the private is: the regiment moves, the smoke closes, the officers shout things nobody can act on. Henry Fleming is not brave or cowardly so much as unreliable about himself, and the book’s method is to keep reporting what he does alongside what he tells himself he is doing.
The twenty-four chapters are given complete.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Part of American Literature.
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About the author
1871–1900 · Victorian
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was born in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister. He published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets at his own expense in 1893 and The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, then worked as a war correspondent in Greece and Cuba; the shipwreck on the way to Cuba became “The Open Boat”. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at twenty-eight.
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