The Red Badge of Courage

by Stephen Crane

Henry Fleming, a farm boy who has enlisted in the Union army dreaming of Greek heroics, waits through weeks of camp rumor for his first battle. When it comes he fights, then runs, then wanders behind the lines inventing excuses, and gets the wound of the title by accident. Stephen Crane was twenty-three, had never seen a war, and built the novel from veterans' talk and his own imagination; it appeared in 1895 and was praised by soldiers for its accuracy. The battle is never named, the officers are voices and the point of view stays inside one frightened mind, which made the book look modern long before most American fiction did. It is available to read online in your browser on Vinteuil, with the first chapter free.