The Red Badge of Courage

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.