Red Badge of Courage

Summary: First published in 1895, America's greatest novel of the Civil War was written before the twenty-one-year-old Stephen Crane had "smelled even the powder of a sham battle." But this powerful psychological study of a young soldier's struggle with the horrors, both within and without, that war unleashes strikes the reader with its undeniable realism and its masterful description of the moment-by-moment riot of emotions ...felt by men under fire. Esteemed scholars such as Alfred Kazin have considered The Red Badge of Courage to be the first American novel of "literary distinction to present war without heroics...in a spirit of total irony and skepticism," and Ernest Hemingway called it an American classic. Crane's genius is as much apparent in his sharp, colorful prose as in his ironic portrayal of an episode of war so intense, so immediate, so real that the terror of battle becomes our own. [read more]