Just over 30 years after the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, a young reporter who had never heard a shot fired in anger managed to produce a literary classic that not only captured the intensity and confusion of the bitter fighting, but also explored for the first time the huge psychological pressures faced by men in battle.
All of this is captured in the tale of one man, Henry Fleming, who to his shame and humiliation finds himself fleeing the battlefield. Gaining his ‘red badge’ – a wound accidentally inflicted by another panicked soldier – he re-enters the fighting the next day, to be hailed as a hero, having found, in the words of American writer Adam Gopnik, ‘a kind of courage that is indistinguishable from insanity’.
Stephen Crane was a writer from an early age, publishing his first novel, Maggie: a girl of the streets, in 1893, a debut that signalled his focus on realistic social issues.
