The 100 best novels
written in English
No. 30
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
(1895)
(1895)
Robert McCrum
Monday 14 April 2014
S
tephen Crane, born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871, completed the short novel that would become the godfather of all American war novels, and an inspiration for writers as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and JD Salinger, while still in his early 20s. His subject, the war between the States, had actually ended before he was born, and he never experienced the horrors of battle. But the laconic realism of his prose, the fierce investigation of the soldier's psyche, and his impressionistic use of colour and detail convinced many readers that Crane was a veteran turned novelist.
Some critics see The Red Badge of Courage as a founding text in the modernist movement, a seminal novel whose influence haunts the composition of The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, The Thin Red Line and Matterhorn, among others. Crane, a struggling freelance writer, researched his subject partly through magazine accounts of the civil war, a popular subject, and partly through conversations with veterans. He later said that he "had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood" and had imagined "war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers". The idea of a writer immersing himself in the literary expression of his subject to make a book for publication, so familiar today, was new in the 1890s, as was his chosen genre, the war story. At this point he had published, unsuccessfully, at his own expense, just one novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), and was creatively out of sorts.
The Red Badge of Courage is not a conventional historical novel. Its texture is cinematic; at the same time, breaking the rules, it eschews all reference to time and place. As the "retiring fog" lifts on the opening page, an army is revealed "stretched out on the hills, resting". This is followed by a brilliant passage, surely an inspiration to subsequent generations of screenwriters: "At night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eye-like gleam of hostile camp fires set in the low brows of distant hills."
Stephen Crane |
Having set the scene, and expanded it with swift economy in a sequence of short chapters, Crane unfolds his creative purpose: to get under the skin of a young soldier, the volunteer Henry Fleming, who has enlisted as a challenge to himself. When fighting breaks out around him, Fleming's courage deserts him. He cannot face the possibility of suffering "a red badge", and flees, before later returning. More manoeuvres and skirmishes follow. Slowly, Fleming overcomes his fear, comes of age, learns to be a soldier and acquires an appetite for battle.
By the end, he has been "an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war", but he has come through, unscathed, and somehow made whole. "He turned now," Crane concludes, "with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks – an existence of soft and eternal peace."
Possibly this was Crane's own wish-fulfilment. He was already fatally ill with tuberculosis. When this, his second novel, was published, he enjoyed a very brief moment of acclaim, while affecting to disdain his efforts. "I don't think The Red Badge to be any great shakes," he said. Crane died in Germany in 1900. After the first world war the novel was rediscovered, and has never been out of print since.
A note on the text
Crane began writing the book that would become The Red Badge of Courage(at first it was titled "Private Fleming/His various battles") in June 1893, and submitted the completed manuscript of 55,000 words to the publisher SS McClure, who held it for six months without making a decision. Once Crane had retrieved his still unpublished work he gave it to another publisher, Irving Bacheller, who sold the serial rights to the Philadelphia Press. So The Red Badge of Courage made its first appearance as a serialisation of just 18,000 words, a version that was quickly reprinted in more than 200 city newspapers and nearly 600 weekly publications, where it was an immediate hit with readers.
The success of the serialisation led to publication in book form by D Appleton in October 1895. This version was 5,000 words shorter than Crane's original; many strange and disfiguring cuts were not restored until the definitive Norton & Co edition of 1982. Here in the UK, William Heinemann launched a British edition in 1896 as part of its Pioneer series. HG Wells, who was a friend of Crane's, noted enviously that The Red Badge of Courage was welcomed with "an orgy of praise" in England, which encouraged Crane to settle here in the years before his premature death in 1900. It was a brief moment of happiness for the young man. Crane wrote to a friend: "I have only one pride and that is that the English edition of The Red Badge of Courage has been received with great praise by the English reviewers. I am proud of this simply because the remoter people would seem more just and harder to win." Another critic, Harold Frederic, wrote that: "If there were in existence any books of a similar character, one could start confidently by saying that it was the best of its kind. But it has no fellows. It is a book outside of all classification. So unlike anything else is it that the temptation rises to deny that it is a book at all."
Three more from Stephen Crane
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893); The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898); Active Service (1899).
THE 100 BEST NOVELS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH
001 The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)
002 Robinson Crusoe by Danie Defoe (1719)
003 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
004 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
005 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
008 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
009 Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock(1818)
011 Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli (1845)
012 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
015 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
016 The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
017 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
019 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
020 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868-9)
021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)
023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)
024 Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
025 Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)
026 The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)
027 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
028 New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)
029 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)
030 The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895)
031 Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
033 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
034 Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
037 Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (1904)
038 The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1908)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)
041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)
042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
053 The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
055 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
070 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949)
071 The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
072 The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
073 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
074 Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
075 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
076 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
077 Voss by Patrick White (1957)
078 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
080 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
081 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
082 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
083 A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood (1964)
084 In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)085 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1966)
086 Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
088 Rabbit Redux by John Updike (1971)
089 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)
090 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
091 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
095 The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)
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