Novel
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane · 1895
Opening lines
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A farm boy enlists in the Union army against his mother's advice, picturing battles of the ancient kind. The regiment waits for months without seeing anything, then is pushed forward. At the enemy's second charge, the boy throws down his rifle and runs. He wanders in the rear among the wounded coming back, envies each of them his wound, and in the crush receives a blow from a rifle butt from a fleeing soldier that wounds him in the head. Back in camp at night, he claims to have been hit by a bullet, and he is believed.
Context
The author had never seen a battle; he worked from the Century's series of recollections Battles and Leaders, which he judged accurate on movements and silent on what the men felt. An abridged version ran in the newspapers in December 1894, before the volume published by Appleton in October 1895. The fictional regiment, the 304th New York, is named in passing in a line of dialogue, but neither the battle, modelled on Chancellorsville, nor the commanders are, and the hero is mostly referred to only as the youth. The book triumphs first in England, then in the United States.
Who it is for
A short novel, told as close as possible to a single soldier who sees of the battle only what surrounds him; critics note a sustained use of colour, close to impressionism.
Prizes and reception
Welcomed with enthusiasm in London, where some critics took the author to be a veteran of the war, it afterwards became an American success.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.