The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane - 1895
Introduction
One of the most famous novels about the Civil War ever written, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage first appeared in print not as a novel but as a newspaper serial. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines would often print a small portion of a novel in each issue, with the hope that interested readers would buy subsequent issues to find out what happened next. This tactic was used effectively to boost a periodical's sales. In 1894, a shortened version of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was serialized in the Philadelphia Press.
The American reading public of the time was hungry for stories about war, particularly the Civil War. The publication of The Red Badge of Courage established Stephen Crane, only twenty-four years old, as one of America's premier war authors. Crane's reputation as a talented war writer is ironic when one realizes that the author was born six years after the Civil War ended and, at the time he wrote the novel, he had never seen a war.
The Red Badge of Courage is the tale of Henry Fleming, a young private in the Union army during the Civil War.
