The Red Badge of Courage

Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle.

The Red Badge of Courage garnered widespread acclaim, what H. G. Wells called "an orgy of praise",[3] shortly after its publication, making Crane an instant celebrity at the age of twenty-four.

Most critics thought the unsentimental Bowery tale crude or vulgar, and Crane chose to publish the work privately after it was repeatedly rejected for publication.

This version of the novel differed greatly from Crane's original manuscript; the deletions were thought by some scholars to be due to demands by an Appleton employee who was afraid of public disapproval of the novel's content.

However, the contract also stipulated that he was not to receive royalties from the books sold in Great Britain, where they were released by Heinemann in early 1896 as part of its Pioneer Series.

Private Henry Fleming, a young teenaged recruit, remembers his romantic reasons for enlisting as well as his mother's resulting protests, wonders whether he will remain brave in the face of fear or turn and run back.

His regiment encounters an isolated Confederate unit, and in the ensuing fight Henry proves to be a capable soldier, comforted by the belief that his previous cowardice had not been noticed, as he "had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man".

The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky.

Nevertheless, the realistic portrayal of the battlefield in The Red Badge of Courage has often misled readers into thinking that Crane (despite being born six years after the end of the Civil War) was himself a veteran.

Century's "Battles and Leaders" series served as direct inspiration for the novel, and one story in particular (Warren Lee Goss's "Recollections of a Private") contains many parallels to Crane's work.

[24] Thomas Beer wrote in his problematic 1923 biography[25] that Crane was challenged by a friend to write The Red Badge of Courage after having announced that he could do better than Émile Zola's La Débâcle.

[30] Furthermore, there was a Private James Conklin who served in the 124th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment,[31] and Crane's short story "The Veteran", which was published in McClure's Magazine the year after The Red Badge of Courage,[32] depicts an elderly Henry Fleming who specifically identifies his first combat experience as having occurred at Chancellorsville.

[33] A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.

[35] Told in a third-person limited point of view, the novel reflects the inner-experience of Henry Fleming, a young soldier who flees from combat, rather than upon the external world around him.

"[2] Writing more than thirty years after the novel's debut, author Joseph Conrad agreed that the novel's main struggle was internal rather than external, and that Fleming "stands before the unknown.

"[37] Crane's realistic portrayal of the psychological struck a chord with reviewers; as one contemporary critic wrote for The New York Press: "At times the description is so vivid as to be almost suffocating.

[42] As with many of Crane's fictional works, the novel's dialogue often uses distinctive local dialects, contributing to its apparent historicity; for example, Jim Conklin muses at the beginning of the novel: "I s'pose we must go reconnoiterin' 'round th' kentry jest t' keep 'em from gittin' too clost, or t'develope'm, or something".

[47] In particular, the death of Henry Fleming's Christ-like friend, Jim Conklin, is noted for evidence of this reading, as well as the concluding sentence of chapter nine, which refers to the sun as "fierce wafer" in the sky.

[49] As the title of the work suggests, the main theme of the novel deals with Henry Fleming's attempt to prove himself a worthy soldier by earning his "red badge of courage".

[52] Joseph Hergesheimer wrote in his introduction to the 1925 Knopf edition of the novel that, at its heart, The Red Badge of Courage was a "story of the birth, in a boy, of a knowledge of himself and of self-command.

Although Henry "progresses upwards toward manhood and moral triumph", as he begins to mature by taking leave of his previous "romantic notions," "the education of the hero ends as it began: in self deception.

Dillingham stated that "in order to be courageous, a man in time of physical strife must abandon the highest of his human facilities, reason and imagination, and act instinctively, even animalistically.

[58] The dichotomy between nature's sweetness and war's destructiveness is further described in chapter eighteen: "A cloud of dark smoke as from smoldering ruins went up toward the sun now bright and gay in the blue, enameled sky.

[61]The Red Badge of Courage received generally positive reviews from critics on its initial publication; in particular, it was said to be a remarkably modern and original work.

[3] An anonymous reviewer for The New York Press wrote shortly after the novel's initial publication that "One should be forever slow in charging an author with genius, but it must be confessed that The Red Badge of Courage is open to the suspicion of having greater power and originality than can be girdled by the name of talent.

"[63] The reviewer for The New York Times was impressed by Crane's realistic portrayal of war, writing that the book "strikes the reader as a statement of facts by a veteran",[64] a sentiment that was echoed by the reviewer for The Critic, who called the novel "a true book; true to life, whether it be taken as a literal transcript of a soldier's experiences in his first battle, or... a great parable of the inner battle which every man must fight.

[72] Frederic, who would later befriend Crane when the latter relocated to England in 1897, juxtaposed the novel's treatment of war to those by Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola and Victor Hugo, all of whose works he believed to be "positively... cold and ineffectual" when compared to The Red Badge of Courage.

"[74] For the remainder of Crane's short career (he died from tuberculosis at the age of 28), The Red Badge of Courage served as the standard against which the rest of his works were compared.

Written by Huston and Albert Band, the film suffered from a troubled production history, went over budget, and was cut down to only seventy minutes despite objections from the director.

[82] A made-for-television movie was released in 1974, starring Richard Thomas as Fleming, while the 2008 Czech film Tobruk was partly based on The Red Badge of Courage.