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Introduction

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a supernova in the American literary firmament in the 1890s, bursting upon the scene and burning with intense energy for several years before dying prematurely. Yet so prolific was he during his brief career—a period that coincided with the most severe economic crisis in America before the Great Depression of the 1930s—that the standard edition of his complete writings contains ten thick volumes of fiction, poetry, and reportage. Like other authors of realistic tales, including W. D. Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, and Willa Cather, Crane was trained as a journalist. But in his best writings he pushed beyond realism to irony, parody, and impressionism. Crane was both an apprentice and a pioneer, simultaneously learning his craft as he changed the course of American literary history. Who knows how much more he might have accomplished had he lived? At his death he was eleven years younger than Mark Twain had been when he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, exactly the same age as Theodore Dreiser when he published his first novel Sister Carrie, eleven years younger than Willa Cather would be when she published her first novel in 1913. Yet the brevity of his life is part of the legend of the hard-drinking, hard-living bohemian. “Before ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ was published, I found it difficult to make both ends meet,” he once admitted. “It was an effort born of pain. . . . It seems a pity that this should be so—that art should be a child of suffering, and yet such seems to be the case.”1I

Born to a teetotaling Methodist minister and his wife in Newark in 1871, Stephen Crane moved with his family to Port Jervis, New York, in 1878. Between 1888 and 1891 he attended Claverack and Lafayette Colleges and Syracuse University, where he seems to have majored in baseball. “I began the battle of life with no talent, no equipment, but with an ardent admiration and desire,” he reminisced shortly before the publication of The Red Badge of Courage. “I did little work at school, but confined my abilities, such as they were, to the diamond. Not that I disliked books, but the cut-and-dried curriculum of the college did not appeal to me. . . . And my chiefest desire was to write plainly and unmistakably.”2 While still at college he published his first articles in New York-area newspapers, and in 1893 he self-published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, under a pseudonym. Though hailed by such critics as W. D. Howells (“perhaps the best tough dialect which has yet found its way into print”) and Hamlin Garland (“the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read”), the novel sold virtually no copies.3

In June 1893, after reading a series in Century magazine on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” Crane began to write The Red Badge of Courage. As he later explained to his friend Louis Senger, “I deliberately started in to do a pot-boiler . . .