The Red Badge of Courage - Softcover

Stephen Crane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1580495869 ISBN 13: 9781580495868

Publisher: Prestwick House Inc, 2004

Synopsis

Following its initial appearance in serial form, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was published as a complete work in 1895 and quickly became the benchmark for modern anti-war literature.

Although the exact battle is never identified, Crane based this story of a soldier's experiences during the American Civil War on the 1863 Battle of Chancellorsville. Many veterans, both Union and Confederate, praised the book's accurate representation of war, and critics consider its stylistic strength the mark of a literary classic.

This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition includes a little-known section entitled "The Veteran," which depicts Henry Fleming as an old man discussing his experiences in the Civil War with his grandson. Additionally, a glossary and reader's notes are provided to help the reader understand the language of 19th century America.

About this title

From the Publisher

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From the Inside Flap

The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895, when its author, an impoverished writer living a bohemian life in New York, was only twenty-three. It immediately became a bestseller, and Stephen Crane became famous. Crane set out to create "a psychological portrayal of fear." Henry Fleming, a Union Army volunteer in the Civil War, thinks "that perhaps in a battle he might run....As far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself." And he does run in his first battle, full of fear and then remorse. He encounters a grotesquely rotting corpse propped against a tree, and a column of wounded men, one of whom is a friend who dies horribly in front of him. Fleming receives his own "red badge" when a fellow soldier hits him in the head with a gun. "The idea of falling like heroes on ceremonial battlefields," Ford Madox Ford remarked later, "was gone forever." Shelby Foote, author of The Civil
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Edition details

• Publisher: Prestwick House Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1580495869
• ISBN 13: 9781580495868
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152