Stephen Crane

Small masterpiece set the pattern for the treatment of war in modern fiction. Amid the nightmarish chaos of a Civil War battle, a young soldier discovers courage, humility, and, perhaps, wisdom. Widely praised for uncanny re-creation of the sights, sounds, and sense of actual combat. An enduring landmark of American fiction.

This harrowing tale of a young girl in the slums is a searing portrayal of turn-of-the-century New York, and Stephen Crane's most innovative work. Published in 1893, when the author was just twenty-one, it broke new ground with its vivid characters, its brutal naturalism, and its empathic rendering of the lives of the poor. It remains both powerful, severe, and harshly comic (in Alfred Kazin's words) and a masterpiece of modern American prose. This edition includes Maggie and George's Mother, Crane's other Bowery tales, and the most comprehensive available selection of Crane's New York journalism. All texts in this volume are presented in their definitive versions.

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.

The Red Badge of Courage is an American masterpiece-and yet the novel familiar to so many readers is not, in fact, the story Crane wrote. That story is the one printed here, as Henry Binder has recovered it, as fully as possible, from the author's final handwritten manuscript. Just prior to the first publication of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895, many key passages, phrases, words, and an entire chapter were deleted. Almost certainly, these deletions were made at the suggestions of Crane's editor, with the intention of satisfying a wider contemporary audience with a simpler story. The deletions were made hastily, not as careful or deliberate improvements. In this new, "authentic" (Herbert Mitgang, New York Times) text, Binder has restored the deleted material and followed the manuscript in many details; he has thus given us the version of Crane's gripping work in which the author's controlling vision is unmistakably present. Binder describes his editorial procedures and discusses the "new novel" that is the result, as well as providing textual notes.

Crane's complete novels are accompanied by his poetry and, arranged by place and time, his short stories, sketches and newspaper articles

First published in 1895, America's greatest novel of the Civil War was written before 21-year-old Stephen Crane had "smelled even the powder of a sham battle." But this powerful psychological study of a young soldier's struggle with the horrors, both within and without, that war strikes the reader with its undeniable realism and with its masterful descriptions of the moment-by-moment riot of emotions felt by me under fire. Ernest Hemingway called the novel an American classic, and Crane's genius is as much apparent in his sharp, colorful prose as in his ironic portrayal of an episode of war so intense, so immediate, so real that the terror of battle becomes our own ... in a masterpiece so unique that many believe modern American fiction began with Stephen Crane. "The Red Badge Of Courage has long been considered the first great 'modern' novel of war by an American--the first novel of literary distinction to present war without heroics and this in a spirit of total irony and skepticism." -- Alfred Kazin

This edition reprints the first published version, that of 1893. Misprints and errors have been corrected and are identified in "A Note on the Text." Footnotes indicate changes in wording Crane made for the 1896 edition and explain slang expressions and customs of the day. Maps of the novel’s New York City locales are also provided. "Backgrounds and Sources" includes nonfictional accounts of urban life by Jacob Riis and others from which Crane drew, as well as discussions of Crane’s literary sources "The Author and the Novel" traces the history of the novel's composition and revision. Contemporary American reviews of the 1893 Maggie and American and English reviews of the 1896 edition focus on the historical importance of the work, the values and tastes of the 1890s, and Crane’s modernism. The modern critical essays are by John Berryman, Charles Child Walcutt, William Bysshe Stein, Joseph X. Brennan, Janet Overmyer, Donald Pizer, Joseph Katz, Eric Solomon, Jay Martin, Donald B. Gibson, Arno Karlen, Katherine G. Simoneaux, Frank Bergon, Hershel Parker, Brian Higgins, and Thomas A. Gullason.

“A man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not responsible for his vision—he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty.” In the course of his tragically abbreviated career, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) saw things that his contemporaries preferred to overlook—the low life of New York’s Irish slums; the tedium, brutality, and chaos that were the true conditions of the Civil War; the ambiguous contract that binds a terrified man to his killer and the damned to their human judges. He communicated what he saw with the same laconic factuality that characterized his journalism and, in the process, laid the foundations for the unblinking realism of Hemingway and Dos Passos. The Portable Stephen Crane allows us to appreciate the full scope and power of this writer’s vision. It contains three complete novels—Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George’s Mother, and Crane’s masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage; nineteen short stories and sketches, including “The Blue Hotel” and “The Open Boat,” a barely fictionalized account of his own escape from shipwreck while covering the Cuban revolt against Spain; the previously unpublished essay “Above All Things”; letters and poems, plus a critical essay and notes by the noted Crane scholar Joseph Katz.

Volume IV of The Works of Stephen Crane presents the romance The O'Ruddy, the work written by Crane but left unfinished at his death and completed b Robert Barr.