The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage is an 1895 war novel by Stephen Crane, written when its author was in his early twenties and had never seen a battle. It follows one private through one campaign, and it was among the first American novels to describe fighting from inside a soldier's head rather than from the position of a general watching a map.

Henry Fleming enlists against his mother's wishes and spends his first weeks in camp worrying about how he will behave when the shooting starts. When it does, he breaks and runs, and the middle of the book follows his flight through woods and roads crowded with wounded men, an experience that strips away the language of glory he arrived with.

Crane drew on written accounts by veterans and set the fighting at a battle generally identified with Chancellorsville. His realism is psychological rather than documentary: the book is interested in shame, self-justification and the stories a man tells himself. Henry's return to his regiment closes the novel on a note readers have argued about ever since.