The Red Badge of Courage [Paperback]

First published in 1895, America's greatest novel  of the Civil War was written before 21-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 strikes the  reader with its undeniable realism and with its  masterful descriptions of the moment-by-moment riot  of emotions felt by me under fire. Ernest  Hemingway called the novel an American classic, and  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 ... in a  masterpiece so unique that many believe modern American  fiction began with Stephen Crane."The Red Badge Of Couragehas long been considered the first great 'modern' novel of war by an American—the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism."—Alfred KazinStephen Crane was born in Newark, NJ in 1871, the son of a Methodist minister. Before he reached twenty-five, Crane had made his mark on the American literary scene by writing two major works:Maggie: a Girl of the Streets (1893) andThe Red Badge of Courage(1895). He failed a theme-writing course in college at the same time he was writing articles for newspapers, among them the New York Herald Tribune.Maggie, drawn from firsthand observations in the slums of New York, was praised and condemned for its sordid realism. By contrast,The Red Badge of Courage, also praised for its realism, was drawn entirely from newspaper accounts and research, as Crane himself never went to war. Crane's adventurous spirit drove him to Cuba in 1896, providing the experil˜