Mrs. Oberthier's Site - Stephen Crane

Author of
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
- (1895) -
An Episode of the American Civil War

Stephen Crane, born 01 Nov 1871, in Newark, New Jersey was the youngest of fourteen children. His father, a strict Methodist minister, died in 1880, leaving his wife to raise the family. Crane spent less than two years in college. Crane worked as a freelance writer in New York, splitting his time between his apartment in the Bowery slum in Manhattan and well-off family in the nearby town of Port Jervis. He published his first work "Maggie", a scandalous writing for its time. at his own expense.

First published in 1895, "The Red Badge Of Courage, quite different from Maggie, in style and approach, has long been considered the first great 'modern' novel of war by an American. It immediately became a bestseller, and Stephen Crane became famous not to mention the book brought quite a bit of money. It is an amazing Civil War story of a farm boy turned soldier. Henry Fleming is a young Union soldier struggling with the horrors of war and the destruction of lives and property. Over the span of a few days, Henry must decide whether he is courageous enough to remain in the war, or so cowardly that he must flee and hide. He 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.'

Crane eventually relocated to England where his life style became quite lavish. He drove himself deeply into debt by throwing huge, expensive parties all the while having people take advantage of his lavishness. He worked on a novel about the Greek War and continued writing short stories and poetry, at this point to pay off his large debts. The stress of this life, compounded by an almost blatant disregard for his own health, led to his contracting tuberculosis. He died while in Baden, Germany, trying to recover from this illness. He was not yet 29 years old.

Works of Stephen Crane

Stories and Sketches

The Blue Hotel - 1898
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
A Dark Brown Dog - 1901
A Desertion - 1900
An Experiment in Misery
Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure
The Great Boer Trek - 1900
God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen - 1899
The Judgement of the Sage - 1896
His New Mittens - 1898
The Kicking Twelfth - 1900
The Lone Charge of W. B. Perkins - 1899
A Man and Some Others - 1897
Marines Signalling Under Fire at Guantanamo - 1899
The Men in the Storm - 1894
The Monster - 1898
An Ominous Baby - 1894
The Open Boat - 1894
A Self-Made Man - 1899
Tent in Agony. A Sullivan County Sketch. - 1892
The Woof of Thin Red Threads - 1898

Novels

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
The Red Badge of Courage - 1895
The Little Regiment - 1896
The Revenge of the Adolphus - 1899
The Scotch Express - 1899
The Second Generation - 1899
The Sergeant's Private Madhouse - 1899
The Shrapnel of their Friends - 1900
Twelve O'Clock - 1899
The Upturned Face - 1900
The Veteran - 1896

Poems

The Black Riders
War is Kind - 1896

Whilomville Stories

The Angel Child - 1899
The Carriage-Lamps - 1900
The City Urchin and the Chaste Villagers - 1900
The Fight - 1900
The Knife - 1900
A Little Pilgrim - 1900
The Lover and the Telltale - 1899
Lynx-Hunting - 1899
Making an Orator - 1899
Shame - 1900
Showin' Off - 1899
The Stove - 1900
The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps - 1900