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Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is an impressionistic novel by American author Stephen Crane. The narrator tells about a young, 19-year-old boy named Henry Fleming, a recruit in the American Civil War. The story is about the meaning of courage. Although Crane was born after the war and had never seen battle himself, the novel is one of the most influential American anti-war stories ever written. Crane met and spoke with a number of veterans as a student and he created what is widely regarded as an unusually realistic depiction of a young man in battle.

His writing is notable for its detached and critical style, often addressing uncomfortable issues on a deeply psychological level in a way that was ground-breaking in the genre. Though Crane never names the battle in which Fleming participates, it is said in the sequel to The Red Badge of Courage, The Veteran, that Henry was fighting in the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. The battle was won by the Confederacy. There is a slight hint to the battle in The Red Badge of Courage when Henry wishes to say "All quiet on the Rappahannock" during combat as a joke to his comrades. This is in reference to the Rappahannock River, located adjacent to the site of the Battle of Chancellorsville.

(From Wikipedia, description text under GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL))

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