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  • Published: 10 January 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143039358
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $29.99

The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories



Henry Fleming, a raw Union Army recruit in the American Civil War, is anxious to confirm his patriotism and manhood—to earn his “badge of courage.” But his dreams of heroism and invulnerability are soon shattered when he flees the Confederate enemy during his baptism of fire and then witnesses the horrible death of a friend. Plunged unwillingly into the nightmare of war, Fleming survives by sheer luck and instinct.

This edition of Stephen Crane’s poignant classic is supplemented by five of his acclaimed short stories as well as selected poetry, offering the full range of this great American author’s extraordinary talent.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Published: 10 January 2006
  • ISBN: 9780143039358
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $29.99

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a Methodist minister and the daughter of a Methodist bishop. 'Stevie,' their fourteenth and last child, turned from his devout roots to a young manhood of pool, poker, and baseball. Following preparatory school at Claverack College, his formal, but hardly his real, education ended with one semester at Lafayette and one at Syracuse University.

Maggie, a Girl of the Streets appeared in 1893, part of it written at Syracuse, part in New York City's Bowery. Slum life and war attracted Crane imaginatively and then literally. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) made him famous before he ever saw any fighting. Active as a reporter in the West, Mexico, Greece, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, he eventually became involved romantically, and perhaps chivalrously, with Cora Howorth Stewart (Taylor), madame of the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville, Florida.

Crane penultimately settled down with Cora Howorth Stewart (Taylor) in England in 1899, writing energetically to pay debts and alternately enjoying and feeling plagued by the company of visiting writers, among them Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells.

He died on June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany, where he and Cora had sought relief for his tuberculosis. After his death Cora returned to her former profession in Jacksonville, opening a new house modelled, so the legend goes, along the lines of Brede Place, the medieval pile they had occupied in England.

Two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899); several volumes of later fiction, including some of his very best as well as some hasty and sentimental work; and an unfinished romance, The O'Ruddy (published in 1903 as completed by Robert Barr), form part of the ten-volume Works, edited by Fredson Bowers and published (1969–75) by the University Press of Virginia.

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