Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, is the story of Henry Fleming, a young, inexperienced small-town soldier who is coming of age during the Civil War battle at Chancellorsville. Fleming finds himself involved in a bewildering and petrifying landscape of war rather than the patriotic scenes of glory that he romanticized from the songs and tales of his youth. Mustering up the courage for a heroic rush into battle only to suffer a failure of nerves, he moves back and forth within himself between the desperation for a bold, visible statement of heroic manhood (a wound, or "red badge") and the crippling anxiety that engulfs him. Fleming eventually achieves his heroic charge as his fear gives way to a wild, mad frenzy of "sublime recklessness" in a brave resolution to run at a faltering flag.

The Red Badge of...