In the following excerpt, Solomon claims that with The Red Badge of Courage, Crane revolutionized how modern war novels would be told.

In spite of the abundance of war novels produced by two world conflicts, The Red Badge of Courage is still the masterwork of war fiction. Stephen Crane's novel is the first work in English fiction of any length purely dedicated to an artistic reproduction of war, and it has rarely been approached in scope or intensity since it was published in 1895.

Any judgment of the influence of The Red Badge of Courage on later war fiction would of necessity be conjectural. The circumstance that Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway worshipped at the Crane shrine does not in itself prove that No More Parades or A Farewell to Arms was directly affected by Crane's book. But the novel became part of the literary heritage of...