Crane Stephen - The red badge of courage: an episode of the American Civil War

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
AND OTHER STORIES

STEPHEN CRANE (18711900) was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was schooled at a Methodist seminary in New Jersey and then at Claverack CollegeHudson River Institute, New York. After a brief and undistinguished period studying engineering at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and then as a science major at Syracuse University, Crane turned to journalism. Moving to New York City, he wrote for the New York Tribune, which in 1892 published five of his burlesque Sullivan County Sketches. While living in poverty in various rooming houses and tenements, he became friends with the established authors Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, who praised his first, privately printed novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). The massive popular success of his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage (begun 1893, serialized 1894, and published by Appleton 1895), led to an enhanced career as an intrepid feature-writer. His tour of the western states and Mexico in 1895 provided him with the basis for a number of stories such as The Blue Hotel (1898), and his coverage of the Graeco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars allowed him to observe conditions of battle at first hand. In 1897 Crane and Cora Stewart, his common-law wife, left the United States for Britain, where Crane spent much of the last three years of his life. He died of tuberculosis, at the age of 28, in a sanatorium in the Black Forest, Germany. Cranes other novels, Georges Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1896), and Active Service (1899), fell far short of the success achieved by The Red Badge of Courage. He also published five collections of stories and sketches, and two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899). A fourth novel, The ORuddy, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

ANTHONY MELLORS is a poet and editor of fragmente: a magazine of contemporary poetics. He has taught English and American literature at the universities of Oxford and Durham, and at The Manchester Metropolitan University.

FIONA ROBERTSON is Research Professor at the University of Central England. Her edition of Walter Scotts The Bride of Lammermoor was published in Oxford Worlds Classics in 1991.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

STEPHEN CRANE

and Other Stories

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
ANTHONY MELLORS and FIONA ROBERTSON

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Editorial matter Anthony Mellors and Fiona Robertson 1998

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Crane, Stephen, 18711900.
The red badge of courage and other stories / Stephen Crane;
edited with an introduction and notes by Anthony Mellors and Fiona
Robertson
(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references: (p. ).
1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Fiction.
2. Chancellorsville (Va.), Battle of, 1863Fiction. I. Mellors
Anthony Matthew. II. Robertson, Fiona. III. Title. IV. Series;
Oxford world classics (Oxford University Press).
PS1449.C85 1998 813.4dc21 98-10535

ISBN13: 9780192833150
ISBN10: 0192833154

Typeset by Best-set Ltd., Hong Kong
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

BOTH as a man and as a writer, Stephen Crane was an elusive figure. For Willa Cather he was the first writer of his time in the picturing of episodic, fragmentary life, and for Ford Madox Ford he was a shapeshifter full of fantasies and fantasticisms who adopted contradictory identities:

He was an American, pure-blooded, and of ostentatious manners when he wanted to be. He used to declare at one time that he was the son of an uptown New York Bishop; at another, that he had been born in the Bowery and there dragged up. At one moment his voice would be harsh, like a ravens, uttering phrases like Im a fly-guy thats wise to the all-night push, if he wanted to be taken for a Bowery tough; or He was a mangy, sheep-stealing coyote, if he desired to be thought of cowboy ancestry. At other times, he would talk rather low in very selected English. That was all boyishness.

Cranes ventriloquisms are an essential part of his fiction. Throughout his brief, eclectic, uneven, but brilliantly innovative writing life, his stories focused on individuals in extreme situations and on moments in which selfhood is at once intensely felt and troublingly unstable. In the exemplary case of Cranes second novel and most famous work, The Red Badge of Courage, an untried soldier finds his heroic idealizations replaced by confusing experiences which threaten his subjective fantasies. In a genre traditionally dominated by decisive action rather than by reflection, Cranes Civil War story portrays a character whose erratic responses to battle are mediated by mistaken notions of self-identity.