The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES

STEPHEN CRANE was born in 1871 in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of a family of fourteen children. His father was a prominent Methodist minister and his mother, niece of a Methodist bishop, was a leading churchwoman. After brief attendances at Lafayette College and then Syracuse University, Crane joined his brother's news agency in New Jersey and, while continuing to pursue freelance journalism, drifted into the bohemia of lower Manhattan. His first novel,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1893), failed to find a reading public but was enthusiastically received by Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, who encouraged his literary career. With his next novel,
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895), he became an instant, international celebrity. As a journalist Crane reported from the American West, Mexico, Greece, and Cuba, as well as New York, and also converted a number of his experiences into fiction. The stories and sketches he wrote following the composition of
The Red Badge of Courage
are among the finest short works in all of American literature. In 1899, Crane and his wife, Cora, settled in England, where his tubercular condition was aggravated by the relentless work schedule he undertook in order to meet his debts. He died in a sanitarium in Germany in June 1900.

 

GARY SCHARNHORST is editor of
American Literary Realism
and editor in alternating years of the research annual
American Literary Scholarship
. He has held Fulbright fellowships to Germany and at present is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He has published books on Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. D. Howells, Bret Harte, Horatio Alger Jr., Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

The Red Badge of Courage
first published in the United States of America
by D. Appleton and Company 1895
The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories
published in Penguin Books 1991
The edition with an introduction and notes by Gary Scharnhorst published in Penguin Books 2005

 

Introduction and notes copyright © Gary Scharnhorst, 2005

All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900.
The red badge of courage and other stories / Stephen Crane ; edited with an introduction and notes
by Gary Scharnhorst.
p. cm.
Contents: The red badge of courage—The veteran—The bride comes to Yellow Sky—The blue hotel—
A self-made man—The open boat. Selected poetry. The black riders—Do not weep, maiden, for war
is kind—A newspaper is a collection of half-injustices—The trees in the garden rained flowers.

eISBN : 978-1-101-09835-6

1. Chancellorsville, Battle of, Chancellorsville, Va., 1863—Fiction. 2. Virginia—History—
Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction. 3. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction.
I. Scharnhorst, Gary. II. Title.

 

PS1449.C85A6 2005
813'.4—dc22 2005050900

 

 

 

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

Introduction

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a supernova in the American literary firmament in the 1890s, bursting upon the scene and burning with intense energy for several years before dying prematurely. Yet so prolific was he during his brief career—a period that coincided with the most severe economic crisis in America before the Great Depression of the 1930s—that the standard edition of his complete writings contains ten thick volumes of fiction, poetry, and reportage. Like other authors of realistic tales, including W. D. Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, and Willa Cather, Crane was trained as a journalist. But in his best writings he pushed beyond realism to irony, parody, and impressionism. Crane was both an apprentice and a pioneer, simultaneously learning his craft as he changed the course of American literary history. Who knows how much more he might have accomplished had he lived? At his death he was eleven years younger than Mark Twain had been when he published
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
in 1876, exactly the same age as Theodore Dreiser when he published his first novel
Sister Carrie,
eleven years younger than Willa Cather would be when she published her first novel in 1913. Yet the brevity of his life is part of the legend of the hard-drinking, hard-living bohemian. “Before ‘The Red Badge of Courage' was published, I found it difficult to make both ends meet,” he once admitted. “It was an effort born of pain. . . . It seems a pity that this should be so—that art should be a child of suffering, and yet such seems to be the case.”
¹
I

Born to a teetotaling Methodist minister and his wife in Newark in 1871, Stephen Crane moved with his family to Port Jervis, New York, in 1878. Between 1888 and 1891 he attended Claverack and Lafayette Colleges and Syracuse University, where he seems to have majored in baseball. “I began the battle of life with no talent, no equipment, but with an ardent admiration and desire,” he reminisced shortly before the publication of
The Red Badge of Courage
. “I did little work at school, but confined my abilities, such as they were, to the diamond. Not that I disliked books, but the cut-and-dried curriculum of the college did not appeal to me. . . . And my chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably.”
²
While still at college he published his first articles in New York-area newspapers, and in 1893 he self-published his first novel,
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,
under a pseudonym. Though hailed by such critics as W. D. Howells (“perhaps the best tough dialect which has yet found its way into print”) and Hamlin Garland (“the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read”), the novel sold virtually no copies.
³

In June 1893, after reading a series in
Century
magazine on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” Crane began to write
The Red Badge of Courage
. As he later explained to his friend Louis Senger, “I deliberately started in to do a pot-boiler . . . something that would take the boarding-school element—you know the kind. Well, I got interested in the thing in spite of myself, and I couldn't, I couldn't. I
had
to do it my own way.”
⁴
Crane completed a draft of the story in early April 1894 while living in the Art Students' League building in New York. He was only twenty-two years old. After Garland read the story in manuscript and suggested a few changes, Crane submitted it to S. S. McClure to consider for publication in
McClure's Magazine
or by his newspaper syndicate. After receiving a noncommittal response from McClure, however, Crane retrieved the manuscript in October and submitted it to Irving Bacheller, whose syndicate serialized a truncated version of the story in several major newspapers, including the
Philadelphia Press,
the following December. On the basis of this serialization, Ripley Hitchcock, the chief editor of D. Appleton and Co., accepted the novel in February 1895 for book publication. Meanwhile, Crane was traveling in the West and Mexico, and after his return to New York in May he signed a contract with Appleton that provided for a standard 10 percent royalty on all sales of the novel. After
Current Literature
excerpted part of a chapter in its August issue,
The Red Badge of Courage,
only the second novel by a virtually unknown young writer, was formally published on September 27.

It was an immediate sales success, with two or three printings in 1895 and as many as fourteen printings the following year. Its critical reception was more mixed, however. On the one hand, many reviewers, especially in England, were impressed by the realism of its battle scenes, ranking
The Red Badge of Courage
with Tolstoi's
War and Peace
and Zola's
La Débâcle
. Edward Marshall averred in the New York
Press,
for example, that only Tolstoi had described as vividly as Crane “the curious petty details of personal conduct and feeling when the fight is thickest.” In the
New Review,
George Wyndham, the British Undersecretary for War, opined that Crane realized “by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war” than either Tolstoi or Zola. Harold Frederic, the London correspondent of the
New York Times,
insisted that the novel “impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before” and compared Crane with Tolstoi, Balzac, Hugo, Mérimée, and Zola.
⁵
Rudyard Kipling reportedly traveled with a copy of the novel in his pocket; the New York Commissioner of Police, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote Crane a congratulatory letter; and Crane was told that a copy was filed in the archives of the War Department in Washington.
⁶
John W. De Forest, a Civil War veteran and the author of
Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty
(1867), thought
Red Badge
was “a really clever book, with a good deal of really first-class work in it. His battle scenes are excellent, though I never saw a battery that could charge at full speed across a meadow” as happens in chapter IV.
⁷
Though Crane was not born until six years after the armistice, he was famously credited with serving in the Union Army. As he explained, many reviewers “insist that I am a veteran of the civil war, whereas . . . I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle.” He speculated that he had “got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field”
⁸
—and, indeed, he describes in chapter XIX how his protagonist Henry Fleming runs for cover with “his head low, like a football player.”