Stephen Crane published The Red Badge of Courage in 1895. Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier in the American Civil War, has enlisted with romantic ideas about heroism that his first taste of battle comprehensively dismantles. He flees from a Confederate charge, spends a day wandering behind the lines and rationalizing his desertion, returns to his regiment after accidentally receiving a head wound that his comrades mistake for a battle injury, the "red badge" of the title, and performs genuine acts of courage in the subsequent fighting. The novel ends without resolving whether Henry's eventual courage is real or another performance for an audience he has not yet acknowledged.
Crane wrote the novel without having seen combat, using published accounts of the Battle of Chancellorsville as research. His departure from conventional Civil War fiction, which tended toward either jingoism or sentimental loss, was the refusal to moralize about Henry's behavior. Henry is not condemned for his cowardice, exactly, but neither is his eventual courage presented as achieving anything: the regiment's gains are described as insignificant in the larger context of the battle, and Henry's sense of accomplishment is left as provisional self-assessment rather than confirmed fact. The narrative style, close third-person, tracking Henry's consciousness with ironic distance, creates a reading experience in which the character's self-understanding and the narrator's implied view of that understanding are never quite the same.
The Red Badge of Courage is the earliest American novel to engage seriously with the psychology of combat, the relationship between fear, performance, and genuine courage, and the difficulty of distinguishing between them from inside the experience. That Crane achieved this without personal experience of war, working from historical records and imagination, is impressive as a technical feat. His portrayal of the Civil War as experienced at the level of a confused young private, rather than as a historical event with clear strategic shape, anticipates the war fiction that follows Hemingway by thirty years.
Jane Austen wrote all six major novels without a dedicated writing room, she hid her work under blotting paper whenever visitors arrived.
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