Red Badge of Courage

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.''