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Zusatztext "As to 'masterpiece!' there is no doubt that The Red Badge of Courage is that." --Joseph Conrad Informationen zum Autor Stephen Crane, born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, was the fourteenth child of a Methodist minister and his wife. Despite a brief stint at Syracuse University, he left academia to pursue a career in journalism and literature. His early experiences reporting on New York City's impoverished neighborhoods profoundly influenced his writing.In 1893, Crane self-published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which is considered one of the earliest works of American literary naturalism. He gained international acclaim with his 1895 novel, The Red Badge of Courage, a vivid portrayal of a soldier's experience during the Civil War. Notably, Crane wrote this realistic account without having any personal military experience.Beyond his novels, Crane was also a prolific journalist and war correspondent, covering conflicts such as the Greco-Turkish War and the Spanish-American War. His adventurous life and relentless work ethic took a toll on his health. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 28 on June 5, 1900, in Badenweiler, Germany, leaving behind a significant literary legacy that influenced future generations of writers. Klappentext One of the greatest works of American literature, The Red Badge of Courage gazes fearlessly into the bright hell of war through the eyes of one young soldier, the reluctant Henry Fleming. Written by Stephen Crane at the age of twenty-one, the novel imagines the Civil War's terror and loss with an unblinking vision so modern and revolutionary that, upon publication, critics hailed it as a work of literary genius. Ernest Hemingway declared, "There was no real literature of our Civil War . . . until Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage." This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes the short story "The Veteran," Crane's tale of an aged Civil War soldier looking back at his past. Leseprobe From the Introduction by Shelby Foote When I first encountered The Red Badge , back in my early teens, it fairly bowled me over, this story of how a New York farmboy who, in his terrifying baptism of fire-a baptism of which it could truly be said, in churchly terms, that it was "by total immersion"-first turns tail and runs, a coward, but then rejoins his regiment and comports himself, throughout the second day of battle, as a hero. More than half a century later, and with my own war behind me, the novel bowls me over still, but in a different way, especially in my understanding of Crane's ultimate assessment of his young protagonist: "He was a man." From the time of that furious ten-night burst of first-draft writing, in the early spring of 1893, to the presumably final product in New Orleans, in March of 1895, he had tinkered with and labored over the text, off and on, for two full years. Like Schliemann at Troy, explicators have unearthed at least seven layers of composition and revision underlying the version most of us read today, although some of those scholars-ignoring the fact that Crane never expressed any reservations about what he had passed for the printer-restore the excised portions, long and short, in brackets or in supplements, in an attempt to reinforce their notion of what it was that Crane had been trying to say before he yielded to pressure from Ripley Hitchcock to clip the soaring novel's wings; which, incidentally, is rather like copping the old plea, "The devil made me do it." Crane didn't believe in the devil, nor in "the lake of fire and the rest of the sideshows," and would probably be no more than mildly interested in the outcome. He had known what he was after from the start, yet it was only by making the effort, including the additions and excisions, that he discovered how to get where he was going. The point is that he got there, and h...
