The Red Badge of Courage 

was published by D. Appleton and Company in 1895, about thirty years after
the Civil War ended.

Author
Born in 1871, Stephen Crane was in his early twenties when he moved to New York City to work for
the New York Tribune. He was apparently fascinated and influenced by the people he observed living in the
gritty art scene as well in the poverty-filled tenement housing. He is credited with being influential among
the early American Naturalist writers. In his two major works, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A
Girl of the Streets, Crane's characters experience internal conflict and outside forces that overwhelm the
individual.

Setting
The scenes take place in the fields and roads of the American South, as a Union regiment wanders through
Confederate territory and encounters the enemy on the battlefield. In opening scenes, the soldiers wake
slowly and seem to long for action. The author uses words like lazy, quaint, and retiring, to set the tranquil
scene, and one soldier claims, "I've got ready to move eight times in the last two weeks, and we ain't moved
yet."
This initial tranquility provides a sharp contrast to the harsh reality that the characters experience on the
bloody battlefield in chapters to come.

Main Characters
•Henry Fleming, the main character ( the protagonist). He undergoes the most change in the
story, going from a cocky, romantic young man eager to experience the glory of war to a seasoned
soldier who sees war as messy and tragic.
•Jim Conklin, a soldier who dies in an early battle. Jim's death forces Henry to face his own lack
of courage and reminds Jim of the stark reality of war.
•Wilson, a mouthy soldier who cares for Jim when he is wounded. Jim and Wilson seem to grow
and learn together in battle.
•The wounded, tattered soldier, whose nagging presence forces Jim to face his own guilty
conscience.

Plot
Henry Fleming begins as a naive young man, eager to experience the glory of war. He soon faces the truth
about war and his own self-identity on the battlefield, however.

As the first encounter with the enemy approaches, Henry wonders if he will be brave in the face of battle.
In fact, Henry does panic and flee in an early encounter. This experience sets him on a journey of self-
discovery, as he struggles with his conscience and re-examines his opinions about war, friendship, courage,
and life.

Although Henry fled during that early experience, he did return to the battle, and he escapes condemnation
because of the confusion on the ground. He ultimately overcomes the fear and takes part in courageous
acts. 

Henry grows as a person by gaining a better understanding of the realities of war. 

Questions to Ponder
Think about these questions and points as you read the book. They will help you determine a theme and
develop a strong thesis.

Examine the theme of inner versus outer turmoil:

•What role does Henry's conscience play?

•What does Henry learn from each soldier's death?

Examine male and female roles:

•What role does Henry's mother play?

•What does this novel suggest about our concepts of masculinity and courage? What does this
novel suggest about our concepts of war?

Possible First Sentences

•Sometimes, we have to come face to face with our fears to learn something about ourselves.
•Have you ever been really afraid?
•The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, is a story about growing up.
•What is bravery?

Sources
•Caleb, C. (2014, Jun 30). The red and the scarlet. The New Yorker, 90.
•Davis, Linda H. 1998. Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephan Crane. New York: Mifflin.

Stephen Crane was one of America's foremost realistic writers, and his works have been
credited with marking the beginning of modern American Naturalism. His Civil War
novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a classic of American literature that
realistically depicts the psychological complexities of fear and courage on the battlefield.
Influenced by William Dean Howells's theory of realism, Crane utilized his keen
observations, as well as personal experiences, to achieve a narrative vividness and sense of
immediacy matched by few American writers before him. While The Red Badge of
Courage is acknowledged as his masterpiece, Crane's novella Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets (1893) is also acclaimed as an important work in the development of literary
Naturalism, and his often-anthologized short stories "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel,"
and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky" are among the most skillfully crafted stories in
American literature. Crane also authored a single collection of poetry, The Black Riders,
and Other Lines (1895); in a review written at the time of the publication, the reviewer
acknowledges “Mr. Crane is a true poet whose verse, long after the eccentricity of its form
has worn off, fascinates us and forbids us to lay the volume down until the last line has
been read.”
Born in Newark, New Jersey, Crane was the youngest in a family of 14 children. His desire
to write was inspired by his family: his father, a Methodist minister, and his mother, a
devout woman dedicated to social concerns, were writers of religious articles, and two of
his brothers were journalists. Crane began his higher education in 1888 at Hudson River
Institute and Claverack College, a military school where he nurtured his interest in Civil
War studies and military training. Throughout his college years, Crane wrote, working as a
freelance writer for his brother's news service, and it is thought that he wrote the
preliminary sketch of Maggie while still at Syracuse University. In 1891, deciding that
"humanity was a more interesting study" than the college curriculum, Crane quit school to
work full time as a reporter with his brother and part time for the New York Tribune. In
New York he lived a bohemian existence among the local artists and became well
acquainted with life in the Bowery; from his first-hand knowledge of poverty during this
period he was able to realistically depict tenement life in his writings. In 1893 Crane
privately published his first novella, Maggie, under a pseudonym after several publishers
rejected the work on the grounds that his description of slum realities would shock readers.
According to Crane, Maggie "tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the
world and frequently shapes lives regardless." Critics suggest that the novel was a major
development in American literary Naturalism and that it introduced Crane's vision of life
as warfare: influenced by the Darwinism of the times, Crane viewed individuals as victims
of purposeless forces and believed that they encountered only hostility in their
relationships with other individuals, with society, with nature, and with God. Also
prominent in his first novel is an ironic technique that exposes the hypocrisy of moral
tenets when they are set against the sordid reality of slum life. Although Maggie received
the support of such literary figures as Hamlin Garland and Howells, it was not a success. It
was not until 1896, after Crane tempered the brutalities in a second edition, that the work
received wide recognition.

Crane's second novel, The Red Badge of Courage, won him international fame. His vision
of life as warfare is uniquely rendered in this short, essentially plotless novel. Often
compared to Impressionist painting, The Red Badge of Courage is a series of vivid
episodes in which a young soldier, Henry Fleming, confronts a gamut of emotions—fear,
courage, pride, and humility—in his attempt to understand his battlefield experiences; in
this respect, Fleming represents the "Everyman" of war. Crane's work employs a narrative
point of view that distinctively offers both an objective panorama of the war as well as the
more subjective impressions of the young soldier. Since he had never been to war when he
wrote The Red Badge of Courage, Crane claimed that his source for the accurate
descriptions of combat was the football field; when he finally experienced battle as a war
correspondent, he said of the novel, "It was all right." Critics have long debated
whether The Red Badge of Courage should be considered a product of any specific literary
movement or method. The work has been claimed by several schools and referred to as
Realistic, Naturalistic, Symbolistic, and Impressionistic. Proponents of Realism view The
Red Badge of Courage as the first unromanticized account of the Civil War and find
Fleming's maturation from an inexperienced youth to an enlightened battle-worn soldier to
be truthfully depicted. Defenders of a Naturalistic reading contend that the youth's actions
and experiences are shaped by social, biological, and psychological forces and that his
"development" as a character is incidental to Crane's expert depiction of how these forces
determine human existence. Stylistically, Crane's novel contains elements of both
Impressionism and Symbolism. For example, some critics note that The Red Badge of
Courage is laden with symbols and images, while others explain that Crane's episodic
narrative structure and his consistent use of color imagery are indicative of an
Impressionistic method. A succinct estimate of this debate is offered by Edwin H. Cady:
"The very secret of the novel's power inheres in the inviolably organic uniqueness with
which Crane adapted all four methods to his need. The Red Badge's method is all and
none. There is no previous fiction like it."

Shortly after the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane published the poetry
collection The Black Riders, and Other Lines (1895). Although not widely known, this
volume of free verse foreshadowed the work of the Imagist poets with its concise, vivid
images. During this time Crane continued to work as a journalist, traveling throughout the
American West and Mexico for a news syndicate, and later using his experiences as the
basis for fictional works. Returning to New York, Crane wrote The Third Violet, a story of
bohemian life among the poor artists of New York.

In 1897 Crane met Cora Taylor, the proprietor of the dubiously named Hotel de Dream, a
combination hotel, nightclub, and brothel. Together as common-law husband and wife they
moved to England, where Crane formed literary friendships with Joseph Conrad, H. G.
Wells, and Henry James. Shortly after this move, Crane left to report on the Spanish-
American War for the New York World, an assignment he accepted, in part, to escape
financial debts he and Cora had accrued. Although Crane was ill when he returned to
England, he continued writing fiction in order to satisfy his artistic needs and to earn
money. With Active Service (1899) he produced another flawed work. This war novel,
based on his experiences as a war correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War, is often
described as uneven and sprawling. By 1900, Crane's health had rapidly deteriorated due
to general disregard for his physical well-being. After several respiratory attacks, Crane
died of tuberculosis at the age of 28.

Although Crane achieved the pinnacle of his success with The Red Badge of
Courage, many critics believe that he demonstrated his greatest strength as a short story
writer. His major achievements in this genre are "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and
"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." "The Open Boat" is based on Crane's experience as a
correspondent shipwrecked while on a filibustering expedition to the Cuban
revolutionaries in 1897. The Naturalistic story pits a handful of men against the power of
the indifferent but destructive sea. Crane's characteristic use of vivid imagery is
demonstrated throughout this story to underscore both the beauty and terror of natural
forces. According to critics, Crane is at his best in "The Open Boat," maintaining an even
tone and fluent style while conveying a metaphysical identification between God and
nature. Crane's facility with imagery is again displayed with telling effect in the tragic
story "The Blue Hotel." In this deceptively simple Western tale, "the Swede," one of
Crane's most interesting characters, becomes the inevitable victim of his own
preconceptions about the "Wild West"—fearing a lawless, uncivilized world, his violent
reactions to Western life result in his own death. Thomas Gullason described Crane's
depiction of "the Swede" as "almost Dostoevskyean in its psychological penetration." In
another Western story, the comic "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," Crane parodies the
"shoot 'em-up" Western myth as the characters Jack Potter and Scratchy Wilson fail to
fulfill romantic illusions through a gunfight. In these short stories, as in most of his work,
Crane is a consummate ironist, employing a technique that most critics find consistently
suggests the disparity between an individual's perception of reality and reality as it actually
exists.

Commentators generally agree that for the most part Crane disregarded plot and character
delineation in his work and that he was unable to sustain longer works of fiction. However,
with the proliferation of Crane scholarship during the last twenty years, Crane's literary
reputation has grown. Critics contend that despite his minor flaws, Crane's artistry lies in
his ability to convey a personal vision based on his own sense of integrity. In so doing, he
pioneered a modern form of fiction which superseded the genteel Realism of late 19th-
century American literature.

In 1988 a collection of Crane's letters was published in The Correspondence of Stephen

Crane. Whether the material in this book has provided scholars with new insights into
Crane's thinking or mere confirmation of what was already known, scholars have been
disappointed that the correspondence sheds no light on the question of which version
of The Red Badge of Courage is the most authentic. For example, scholars speculate
whether the famous last line of the novel ("Over the river a golden ray of sun came
through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.") was Crane's intended ending or was written at
the suggestion of his editor. Silence on this point in The Correspondence of Stephen
Crane is perhaps consistent with what Andrew Delbanco, writing in New
Republic, suggested would be "Crane's likely attitude toward such questions: One sees
what one prefers."
NTRODUCTION
Commonly considered Stephen Crane's greatest accomplishment, The Red Badge of
Courage (1895) ranks among the foremost literary achievements of the modern era.
When its publication was announced in Publisher's Weekly on 5 October 1895, Crane
was largely unknown. Although his volume of poetry published earlier that year, The
Black Riders, had made some waves in literary circles, it struck most readers as
quirky and cryptic. The gritty social realism of his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the
Streets (1893) had earned praise from literati such as Hamlin Garland and W. D.
Howells, but Crane probably gave away more copies than were actually sold. (The
story is told that Crane, in a desperate advertising scheme, paid men to ride the
Manhattan El train and conspicuously read copies of Maggie.) When Crane signed a
contract with D. Appleton and Co. to publish Red Badge, he was not well-known
enough to command an advance, and agreed to a flat 10 per cent royalty on the retail
price of all copies sold (Weatherford, 5). Published in the autumn of 1895, Red
Badge went through two editions before the end of the year. By March of 1896 the
novel was in eighth place on the international booksellers' list and had gone through
fourteen printings; remarkably enough, Red Badge has never been out of print (6).
Unfortunately, unremunerative contracts with publishers and a general lack of good
business sense kept Crane insolvent for much of his life. But with the publication
of Red Badge, Crane achieved almost overnight celebrity.
During Crane's lifetime, public interest often focused on his personal life--his
bohemian lifestyle, daring journalistic exploits, and eventual expatriation to Britain--
rather than on his writings. Much of the initial press about Crane's novel was full of
speculation about who he was, where he came from, and how he could write so
convincingly about a war he had never seen. Nevertheless, early reviewers of Red
Badge introduced many of the issues which have remained of interest in subsequent
critical investigations of Crane's work. His "war novel" won him widespread
international praise, from admiring newspaper notices like those in the New
York Times and the Philadelphia Press to the more discerning responses of critics
such as Englishman George Wyndham and the contemporary dean of American
letters, William Dean Howells. For a list of several of the important early reviews of Red
Badge, consult the Reviews page of this project.
BRITISH REVIEWS
British and American reviewers argued quite a bit about who should get credit for the
"discovery" of Crane. While the novel was not universally praised, almost without
exception Crane's critics marveled at the emotional power of his vivid, visual prose.
Some critics groused about Crane's idiosyncratic grammar--he begins one sentence
with "Too," for example--while some others who became involved in
the Dial controversy voiced discontent about what they perceived to be Crane's lack
of patriotism. English critics tended to take Red Badge more seriously than their
American counterparts, pointing out its affinities with works by Tolstoy, Zola,
Kipling, and the battle scenes of the Russian realist painter Verestschagin (13). The
English critic Sydney Brooks, totally convinced by Crane's depictions of combat in Red
Badge, assumed that Crane had fought in the Civil War. If Red Badge were
"altogether a work of the imagination, unbased on personal experience," Brooks
asserted, "its realism would be nothing short of a miracle." Crane's imaginative effort
remains a marvel.
Perhaps the most perceptive of Crane's English critics was George Wyndham, a Member
of Parliament and veteran of the British army. Wyndham was the only one of Crane's
early critics to grasp the significance of narrating the novel from the point of view of
Private Henry Fleming. Generals' accounts, Wyndham noted, had usually been
written from the "band-box" viewpoint and emphasized large-scale concerns (troop
movements, tactical maneuvers, wins and losses), neglecting the much more limited
but in many ways more intense experience of the anonymous foot soldier. ("The real
war," Walt Whitman had declared in his Civil War memoir Specimen Days [1882],
"will never get in the books.") What distinguished Crane in his effort to portray
modern warfare was his use of what Wyndham called a "new device," that of
focusing on the youth and tracing the successive impressions made by the picturesque
and emotional experience of war on his "morbidly sensitive" temperament. Wyndham
wrote: "[Crane] stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man,
and then admits you as to a theatre." Crane's reportage of the "procession of flashing
images shot through the senses into one brain" combined the "strength and truth of a
monodrama with the directness and color of the best narrative prose" (109-110).
Wyndham concluded that Crane's account authentic, Henry's soul "truly drawn."
Much of the impact of Red Badge arose, then, from its powerful pictures of war, the
images that leapt off the page into the mind of the reader. But equally important in
Wyndham's review was his illumination of the intersection between the picturesque
and ethical aspects of the novel. Given that Henry had enlisted in "hasty pursuit of a
vanishing ambition," Wyndham suggested that Crane's "battle pictures" were used to
dramatize the replacement of Henry's early "tinsel bravado" with his later discovery
of "courage in the bedrock of primeval antagonism" (113). Henry's tragic resignation
to duty--his commitment to a cause larger than himself--is his final acknowledgment
that the "justification of any one life lies in its perfect adjustment to others." Crane's
account prophesies the regeneration of America at the same time it suggests the
insignificance of heroes. Readers of Red Badge, Wyndham concluded, should infer
from Henry's experience that "the virtues so instinctual in moments of distress may
be useful also in everyday life" (114).
AMERICAN REVIEWS
Early American reviewers of Red Badge were generally not as incisive as Wyndham.
Perhaps most surprisingly, one American critic writes suggests that in the novel "a
serio-comic effect seems to be intended throughout" (Weatherford, 15). William Dean
Howells, writing in Harper's Weekly, praises Crane's "divinations of motive and
experience" but expresses doubt about whether Crane can be considered a realist'
writer, preferring to call his prose style "impressionistic" (critics still debate about
which, if either, of these labels to use). Novelist Harold Frederic, London editor of the
New York Times, recognized Red Badge as a masterpiece. He wrote that it would
likely be "one of the deathless books which must be read by everybody who desires
to be, or to seem, a connoisseur of modern fiction" (116). From our current
perspective we can see that Frederic was right: Crane's journalistic description and
ironic understatement comprise a stylistic legacy which has descended through
Hemingway and early Mailer and done a great deal in shaping American literature as
we know it (Delbanco, 57).
Like many early reviewers, Frederic expressed admiration for the emotional power of
Crane's work, but he was one of the very few who recognized the boldness and
originality of Crane's technique. "The Red Badge," Frederic claimed, "impels the
feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before"
(Weatherford, 116). Like Wyndham before him, who had compared the novel to a
monodrama presented in the "theatre" of war, Frederic emphasized the novel's visual
aspects and its radical reduction in point of view and narrative scope. "We do not
know, or seek to know...anything...except what, staring through the eyes of Henry
Fleming, we are permitted to see" (117). Red Badge was a "tremendously effective
battle painting;" the trial of a soldier in war, he maintained, "seems never to have
been painted as well before" (118). Henry's actions seemed the actions of the readers'
own minds.
But later in his review Frederic made a more suggestive assessment. Acknowledging
that battle painters have always depicted horses in motion "not as they actually move,
but as it has been agreed by numberless generations of draughtsmen to say that they
move," Frederic held that Crane's novel shatters such conventions. "At last, along
comes a Muybridge [American photographer who specialised in pictures of animals
in motion], with his instantaneous camera, and shows that the real motion is entirely
different." Red Badge is remarkable for its abandonment of painterly conventions and
conveyance of a "photographic revelation." Frederic concludes that the authenticity
of Crane's vision is a "novel force" which may do other "remarkable things" (119).
This intelligently enthusiastic review of the novel did much to focus international
attention on the relatively unknown Crane. The two men became friends but
remained literary rivals: Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware outsold Red
Badge in 1896.
THE DIAL CONTROVERSY
One of the most notable features of Red Badge's reception in America is the
controversy about Crane's patriotism that raged in the pages of the Dial, a magazine
owned by the conservative General Alexander C. McClurg. The outspoken McClurg, who
had risen to the rank of Brigadier-General in the Northern Army, attacked Red
Badge for portraying a Union soldier as a coward. Although Dial editor William Morton
Payne had already made evident the magazine's disapproval of Red Badge, McClurg
maintained that Payne's assessment had not been unfavorable enough. Criticizing
those English and American reviewers who had praised Red Badge, McClurg fumed
at what he saw as another installment in the habitual English ridicule of American
soldiers. Mistakenly assuming that Crane's novel had been first published in England,
McClurg denounced it as a "vicious satire upon American soldiers and American
armies," as part of a plot to undermine confidence in the nation's armed forces (15).
Such books, McClurg finished, should never be allowed to be published in America.
The first response to General McClurg's broadside came in a letter from J. L.
Onderdonk, who, expressing his agreement with McClurg's position, ridiculed Red
Badge as a "literary absurdity." In the same issue of the Dial, Ripley Hitchcock writes to
the editors on behalf of the publishers of the novel, D. Appleton & Co. In an
understated tone which contrasts pointedly with McClurg's heated prose, Hitchcock
points out and corrects some of the General's mistakes while reminding readers of the
numerous favorable notices garnered by the novel. English critic Sydney Brooks, who
had earlier praised Red Badge in the Saturday Review, wrote to the Dial in defense of
Crane's novel. Dismissing McClurg's incendiary speculations about English opinion
of the novel as "misjudged patriotism and bad criticism," Brooks rightly points out
that McClurg's notion of literary standards constituted a form of censorship which
would allow only the most celebratory accounts of American life to be published
(16). The good-natured good sense of Brooks' letter ended the Dial controversy.
JOSEPH CONRAD REMEMBERS
A quarter-century after Crane's death, Joseph Conrad remembered in Last
Essays (1926) that the appearance of Red Badge had been "one of the most enduring
memories of my literary life." Calling Crane "non-comparable" as an artist, Conrad
notes sorrowfully that Crane's life bore a marked parallel with that of Red Badge's
"tattered soldier": "it was his fate, too, to fall early in the fray." Today, Crane's critical
reputation remains strong, and a resurgence of attention to literary realism--New
Essays on the Red Badge of Courage (1986), Amy Kaplan's The Social Construction
of American Realism (1988), Giorgio Mariani's Spectacular Narratives:
Representations of Class and War in the American 1890s (1992)--demonstrates the
continued centrality of many of the questions expressed by the early reviewers of Red
Badge. Much of this recent criticism grapples with issues first raised in Wyndham
and Frederic--the photographic and theatrical aspects of Crane's prose; his
abandonment of narrative conventions in pursuit of a more "authentic" reality.
Mariani, for example, reads Red Badge as a novel of specatular descriptions--vivid
scenes which would satisfy the embryonic consumer society of the 1890s' desire for
thrilling spectacle (Mariani, 4). For Amy Kaplan, realism is a "representation of
reality struggling against other forms of representation" (Kaplan, 1986, 13). This
definition restores to realism its "dynamic literary qualities" by integrating it with the
social context out of which it developed: Red Badge struggles with other
representations of late 19th century reality--popular war novels, chivalric romances,
jingoistic journalism. Thus although much of the early critical scrutiny of Red
Badge boiled down to biographical speculation and nationalistic cheerleading, we can
be grateful to those few reviewers who realized Red Badge was doing important
cultural work. Their analyses suggest some of the reasons why Red Badge became
the standard against which all of Crane's subsequent work was measured.
CONCLUSION
Early reviews of Red Badge raised three issues that will remain of central interest to
the remainder of this project. First, there is Crane's concern with authenticity. Written
in a post-photographic age, Red Badge discards contemporaneous conventions of
battlefield prose for a discontinuous succession of "flashing images" that yield
"photographic revelations." Crane limits the novel's point of view and fragments its
narrative in order to focus the impact of each of his "battle pictures" and make
us see the truth of his descriptions. Second, although much of General McClurg's
commentary about Red Badge's lack of patriotism, for example, is overheated and
irrelevant, he was not entirely wrong to suggest that Crane's novel raised potentially
disquieting questions about the state of turn-of-the-century American society. The
next two sections of this project confront some of those questions. And finally, while
Crane's early critics did not realize that Red Badge is set at the Civil War battle of
Chancellorsville, subsequent scholarly inquiry has revealed this to be the case. The
next section of this project, "The Battle: Chancellorsville," suggests that Crane drew
on literary and pictorial sources in order to establish the factual framework of
Chancellorsville as the setting for Red Badge.