Stephen Crane
1871–1900
Biography
Stephen Crane was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, and he packed a great deal of writing into a life that ended at twenty-eight. He was born into a large Methodist family and began writing as a child, with articles in print before he was sixteen. In 1891 he gave up his studies at Syracuse and took up newspaper reporting, and the plain, observant style he picked up in the newsroom runs through nearly all his fiction.
His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), follows a young woman through the slums of New York's Bowery, and it is often treated as the first American novel of literary Naturalism. He became famous with The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the story of a young soldier in the American Civil War. Crane was born six years after that war ended, so he wrote about a battle he had never seen, and critics have long regarded the book as a masterpiece.
In 1896 he set out to report on the fighting in Cuba, but his ship sank off the coast of Florida, and he drifted for some thirty hours in a small boat before reaching land. He turned that ordeal into the short story “The Open Boat”. In his last years he lived in England with Cora Taylor, who had shared his travels, and he was befriended by Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. He died of tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Germany's Black Forest, aged twenty-eight. Critics later revived a reputation that had faded for two decades, and Ernest Hemingway was one of the writers who learned from his vivid, ironic prose. On this site, The Red Badge of Courage follows a frightened recruit through his doubts about his own courage in battle.
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Books
The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War
by Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by American author Stephen Crane. The novel was published on 3 October 1895. 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.…
Summary from Wikipedia: The Red Badge of Courage (CC BY-SA 4.0)