The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a vivid psychological account of a young man's experience of fighting in the American Civil War, based on Crane's reading of popular descriptions of battle. The intensity of its narrative and its naturalistic power earned Crane instant success, and led to his spending most of his brief remaining life war reporting. The other stories collected in this volume draw on this experience; 'The Open Boat' (1898) was inspired by his fifty hour struggle with waves after his ship was sunk during an expedition to Cuba; 'The Monster' (1899) is a bitterly ironic commentary on the ostracization of a doctor for harbouring the servant who was disfigured and lost his sanity rescuing his son. As a rare example of Crane working in a vein of American Gothic, it is particularly striking for its treatment of race and social injustice. 'The Blue Hotel' traces the events that lead to a murder at a bar in a small Nebraska town. This edition is the most generously annotated edition of Crane's work, exploring it from a fresh critical perspective and focusing on his place as an experimental writer, his modernist legacy and his social as well as literary revisionism.

STEPHEN CRANE was born, the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister, in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871. Writ-ing was an occupation encouraged in Crane's family; two of his brothers became newspapermen. Crane himself began turning out stories at the age of eight. In 1890, following the deaths of both parents, Crane moved to New York City where, to support himself, he worked as a freelance newspaper writer. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which Crane had begun at college, was published pseudonymously in 1893, when he was only twenty-one (Crane had had to borrow money from his brother to pay for its initial printing). Reviewers at the time found Maggie, a penetrating look at New York slum life, too cruel, and the book sold poorly. Crane's first literary success came in 1895 with The Red Badge of Courage.

Crane's travels and experiences during the later 1890s as a war correspondent -- he was sent to the combat areas of Mex-ico, Greece, and Cuba -- furnished rich material for other sto-ries, including The Open Boat (based partly on Crane's own experience of shipwreck off the coast of Florida) and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, whose blend of realism and romanticism earned the praise of William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, and other American realists.

Crane also published two volumes of poetry, The Black Rider and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), which dramatized his rebellion against New England Calvinism and conservative evangelical Christianity. Spumed or ignored by the critics of his own country, Crane traveled with his wife-to--be to England, where The Red Badge of Courage was greatly admired, and where he made the acquaintance of such literary giants as Henry James (another American emigre) and Joseph Conrad.

Crane's adventuresome and roving lifestyle seriously under-mined his health; after fruitless efforts to obtain a cure, he died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany, on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight.

Stephen Crane published other novels and several vol-umes of short stories, including George's Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1897), The Monster and Other Stories (1899), and Whilomville Stories (1900).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192833150
ISBN 10	0192833154
Title	The Red Badge of Courage
Author	Stephen Crane
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1998-12-01
Number of pages	308
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable