The Red Badge of Courage
A young Union soldier runs from his first battle, then returns, and spends the rest of the novel trying to understand what courage actually is. Crane had never been to war when he wrote it, and the book's power comes from its interiority rather than from military detail.
The prose is impressionistic, full of colour and noise, and it influenced the way later American writers described combat. The novel is short and its structure is almost a series of psychological states. It is less a war story than a study of shame.
Public-domain status
First published in 1895. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Stephen Crane died in 1900, so this work has been free to republish there since 1971.
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