Stephen Crane – författare

HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics.‘He felt that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail. He was an unknown quantity.’Following one soldier’s journey from naive recruit to hardened survivor, The Red Badge of Courage is a vivid and powerfully psychological take on the American Civil War. Fighting for the Union army, Henry Fleming is thrown into a bloody war where the harsh realities and horrors of battle quickly become evident. Fearful, occasionally vain, but always viewing the war with honest eyes, Henry eventually comes to thrive as a soldier in combat, and it is with a a new conscience and outlook that he matures into manhood.

“A man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.” In the course of his tragically abbreviated career, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) saw things that his contemporaries preferred to overlook—the low life of New York’s Irish slums; the tedium, brutality, and chaos that were the true conditions of the Civil War; the ambiguous contract that binds a terrified man to his killer and the damned to their human judges. He communicated what he saw with the same laconic factuality that characterized his journalism and, in the process, laid the foundations for the unblinking realism of Hemingway and Dos Passos.  The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer’s vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, and Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including “The Blue Hotel” and “The Open Boat,” a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay “Above All Things”; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

This unflinching portrayal of the squalor and brutality of New York life produced a scandal when it was published in 1893. Crane's novel tells the story of Maggie Johnson, a young woman who, seduced by her brother's friend and then disowned by her family, turns to prostitution. More than the tale of a young woman's tragic fall, this is a powerful exploration of the destructive forces underlying urban society and human nature. Also included here is 'George's Mother', along with eleven other tales and sketches of New York written between 1892 and 1896.

Henry Fleming dreams of the thrill of battle and performing heroic deeds in the American Civil War. But his illusions are shattered when he comes face to face with the bloodshed and horrors of war. Now he's a raw recruit, Henry experiences both fear and self-doubt. Will war make Henry a coward or a hero?A vivid fictionalised account of the experiences of an ordinary innocent young soldier on the battlefields of the American Civil War, introduced by American writer, illustrator and historian, Wendell Minor.

~The Red Badge of Courage," written in 1895 by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest of all American novels. This is a book about the Civil War, and one Union soldier's struggle with his inner demons as he prepares for, and fights his first battle.

Henry Fleming just wants to be a hero. So when he gets the chance to fight in the American Civil War he signs up right away. But out on the battlefield it's a long way from home, and the reality of war is not as romantic as he thought. When you're doomed if you fight and doomed if you run, what's a man to do? Henry doesn't want to be a coward, but sometimes courage is the hardest thing to find. Follow him on his journey of discovery, where the boundaries of right and wrong are not so easy to see.TreeTops Greatest Stories offers children some of the worlds best-loved tales in a collection of timeless classics. Top children's authors and talented illustrators work together to bring to life our literary heritage for a new generation, engaging and delighting children.The books are carefully levelled, making it easy to match every child to the right book.Each book contains inside cover notes to help children explore the content, supporting their reading development. Teaching notes on Oxford Owl offer cross-curricular links and activities to support guided reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Henry Fleming just wants to be a hero. So when he gets the chance to fight in the American Civil War he signs up right away. But out on the battlefield it's a long way from home, and the reality of war is not as romantic as he thought. When you're doomed if you fight and doomed if you run, what's a man to do? Henry doesn't want to be a coward, but sometimes courage is the hardest thing to find. Follow him on his journey of discovery, where the boundaries of right and wrong are not so easy to see. TreeTops Greatest Stories offers children some of the worlds best loved tales in a collection of timeless classics. Top children's authors and talented illustrators work together to bring to life our literary heritage for a new generation, engaging and delighting children.The books are carefully levelled, making it easy to match every child to the right book.Each book contains inside cover notes to help children explore the content, supporting their reading development. Teaching notes on Oxford Owl offer cross-curricular links and activities to support guided reading, writing, speaking and listening.This pack provides 6 copies of the same title.

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a vivid psychological account of a young man's experience of fighting in the American Civil War, based on Crane's reading of popular descriptions of battle. The intensity of its narrative and its naturalistic power earned Crane instant success, and led to his spending most of his brief remaining life war reporting. The other stories collected in this volume draw on this experience; `The Open Boat' (1898) was inspired by his fifty hour struggle with waves after his ship was sunk during an expedition to Cuba; `The Monster' (1899) is a bitterly ironic commentary on the ostracization of a doctor for harbouring the servant who was disfigured and lost his sanity rescuing his son. As a rare example of Crane working in a vein of American Gothic, it is particularly striking for its treatment of race and social injustice. `The Blue Hotel' traces the events that lead to a murder at a bar in a small Nebraska town. This edition is the most generously annotated edition of Crane's work, exploring it from a fresh critical perspective and focusing on his place as an experimental writer, his modernist legacy and his social as well as literary revisionism. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Red Badge of Courage is an American masterpiece-and yet the novel familiar to so many readers is not, in fact, the story Crane wrote. That story is the one printed here, as Henry Binder has recovered it, as fully as possible, from the author's final handwritten manuscript. Just prior to the first publication of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, many key passages, phrases, words, and an entire chapter were deleted. Almost certainly, these deletions were made at the suggestions of Crane's editor, with the intention of satisfying a wider contemporary audience with a simpler story. The deletions were made hastily, not as careful or deliberate improvements. In this new, "authentic" (Herbert Mitgang, New York Times) text, Binder has restored the deleted material and followed the manuscript in many details; he has thus given us the version of Crane's gripping work in which the author's controlling vision is unmistakably present. Binder describes his editorial procedures and discusses the "new novel" that is the result, as well as providing textual notes.

The Fourth Edition offers a broadened and restructured “Backgrounds and Sources” section that illuminates the social and intellectual climate of the 1890s and includes thought-provoking material by Jay Martin, Charles J. LaRocca, and Perry Lentz on Crane’s use of the Battle of Chancellorsville. “Criticism” includes an expanded introduction by Donald Pizer covering major critical approaches to the novel and fourteen assessments that reflect the revival critical interest in The Red Badge of Courage by, among others, R. W. Stallman, Charles C. Walcutt, John Fraser, Amy Kaplan, John E. Curran Jr., James B. Colvert, and Donald Pizer.

This edition reprints the first published version, that of 1893.Misprints and errors have been corrected and are identified in "A Note on the Text."  Footnotes indicate changes in wording Crane made for the 1896 edition and explain slang expressions and customs of the day.  Maps of the novel’s New York City locales are also provided."Backgrounds and Sources" includes nonfictional accounts of urban life by Jacob Riis and others from which Crane drew, as well as discussions of Crane’s literary sources"The Author and the Novel" traces the history of the novel's composition and revision.Contemporary American reviews of the 1893 Maggie and American and English reviews of the 1896 edition focus on the historical importance of the work, the values and tastes of the 1890s, and Crane’s modernism.The modern critical essays are by John Berryman, Charles Child Walcutt, William Bysshe Stein, Joseph X. Brennan, Janet Overmyer, Donald Pizer, Joseph Katz, Eric Solomon, Jay Martin, Donald B. Gibson, Arno Karlen, Katherine G. Simoneaux, Frank Bergon, Hershel Parker, Brian Higgins, and Thomas A. Gullason.

Stephen Crane’s weirdly impressionistic The Red Badge of Courage is one of the first non-romantic novels of the Civil War—and the first non­romantic account to gain wide popularity. Paul Sorrentino introduces Red Badge to a new generation of readers for a fuller appreciation of the novel and its effects. He has selected as his text the first edition, published by D. Appleton & Co. in 1895.