something that would take the boarding-school element—you know the kind. Well, I got interested in the thing in spite of myself, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I had to do it my own way.”4 Crane completed a draft of the story in early April 1894 while living in the Art Students’ League building in New York. He was only twenty-two years old. After Garland read the story in manuscript and suggested a few changes, Crane submitted it to S. S. McClure to consider for publication in McClure’s Magazine or by his newspaper syndicate. After receiving a noncommittal response from McClure, however, Crane retrieved the manuscript in October and submitted it to Irving Bacheller, whose syndicate serialized a truncated version of the story in several major newspapers, including the Philadelphia Press, the following December. On the basis of this serialization, Ripley Hitchcock, the chief editor of D. Appleton and Co., accepted the novel in February 1895 for book publication. Meanwhile, Crane was traveling in the West and Mexico, and after his return to New York in May he signed a contract with Appleton that provided for a standard 10 percent royalty on all sales of the novel. After Current Literature excerpted part of a chapter in its August issue, The Red Badge of Courage, only the second novel by a virtually unknown young writer, was formally published on September 27.

It was an immediate sales success, with two or three printings in 1895 and as many as fourteen printings the following year. Its critical reception was more mixed, however. On the one hand, many reviewers, especially in England, were impressed by the realism of its battle scenes, ranking The Red Badge of Courage with Tolstoi’s War and Peace and Zola’s La Débâcle. Edward Marshall averred in the New York Press, for example, that only Tolstoi had described as vividly as Crane “the curious petty details of personal conduct and feeling when the fight is thickest.” In the New Review, George Wyndham, the British Undersecretary for War, opined that Crane realized “by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war” than either Tolstoi or Zola. Harold Frederic, the London correspondent of the New York Times, insisted that the novel “impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before” and compared Crane with Tolstoi, Balzac, Hugo, Mérimée, and Zola.5 Rudyard Kipling reportedly traveled with a copy of the novel in his pocket; the New York Commissioner of Police, Theodore Roosevelt, wrote Crane a congratulatory letter; and Crane was told that a copy was filed in the archives of the War Department in Washington. 6 John W. De Forest, a Civil War veteran and the author of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), thought Red Badge was “a really clever book, with a good deal of really first-class work in it. His battle scenes are excellent, though I never saw a battery that could charge at full speed across a meadow” as happens in chapter IV.7 Though Crane was not born until six years after the armistice, he was famously credited with serving in the Union Army. As he explained, many reviewers “insist that I am a veteran of the civil war, whereas . . . I never smelled even the powder of a sham battle.” He speculated that he had “got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field”8—and, indeed, he describes in chapter XIX how his protagonist Henry Fleming runs for cover with “his head low, like a football player.”

On the other hand, some readers objected to Crane’s ostensible failures of verisimilitude in the novel. A. C. McClurg, a Civil War general, dismissed it as nothing more than “a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies” and “a mere work of diseased imagination” which ignored entirely “the quiet, manly, self-respecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles.” William M. Payne, editor of the Dial, scorned what he considered Crane’s nondescript method: “There is almost no story to Mr. Crane’s production, but merely an account, in roughshod descriptive style, of the thoughts and feelings of a young soldier during his first days of active fighting.” The reviewer for the New York Independent, in sharp contrast to the favorable notices of the novel, claimed it was merely “a raw lump of pseudo-realism wherein a man, who clearly has no first-hand knowledge of war, attempts to present an American picture in Tolstoi’s manner. It is, in fact, not true to life, and as a romance it is supremely disgusting.” 9 Many other critics negotiated a middle ground between these extremes. A.