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when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. He dragged Joseph Conrad all over London trying to book passage back to the United States. When he finally got to Cuba as a war correspondent, he took foolish risks in his continual investigation of the limits of his own bravery. All the while, his tuberculosis imposed an increasingly greater toll on his body. When he died in Germany on June 5, 1900, he was twenty-nine, having crowded a great deal of ferocious living and quality writing into a very brief span. The fact that most novelists do their best work during their thirties makes Crane’s literary legacy all the more remarkable. We continue to read The Red Badge of Courage today not for its truth about the American Civil War but for its truth about all wars.

IV

What keeps a novel alive is. that succeeding generations of readers find valid correspondences between its insights and their own experiences. I am writing this essay during September 2002, the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks upon the United States. The intended readers of this edition are most likely new to Crane and his fiction. In studying this novel for the umpteenth time, I was struck by the breadth of insight it offers—especially to young women and men trying to comprehend recent events. The parallels between The Red Badge of Courage and September 11, 2001, are chillingly remarkable—the impulse to flee, the adrenaline blood-rush of anger, the appetite for revenge, the confusion amid crisis, the impulse to do something, anything that might be useful, the nightmare of witnessing carnage, the helpless isolation of the individual lost in a hostile environment. Amid the bewilderment on that tragic day, we, like Henry Fleming and the 304th New York, looked toward the flag as a symbol of where we were supposed to be. And if anyone wants a glimmer of the psychological and spiritual price each American soldier has to pay in prosecuting the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere, read The Red Badge of Courage.

Despite our collective pretense that civilization progresses, we will always have to contend with the realities of war and the threat of it. This circumstance inflicts upon the individual red-badge wounds of psychological extremity that can be dressed only by internal reflection. Even when pain is shared publicly, healing must remain private. If the universe is indeed indifferent, as Stephen Crane wrote, then we must each find our own capacity to judge the meaning of our lives.

Richard Fusco received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1990. Since 1997 he has been an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and in short-story narrative theory, he has published monographs about the works of a variety of American, British, and Continental literary figures, including Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jack London, John Reuben Thompson, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. His major works of criticism include Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) and Fin de mil lénaire: Poe’s Legacy for the Detective Story (Enoch Pratt Free Library, 1993).

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE1

AN EPISODE OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

CHAPTER I

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.2 As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile campfires set in the low brows of distant