When Stephen Crane was born in 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, he was the last in a big family of fourteen children. His minister father was very strict and wouldn’t permit his children any amusements except reading.
Although Stephen enjoyed reading, along with writing and baseball, he rebelled against a formal education and dropped out of college. He then moved to New York City, where some free-lance writing for newspapers kept him from always being broke and hungry.
Then a series of magazine articles on Civil War battles gave him the idea of writing a war novel. While the veterans who wrote these articles described what happened, they never described how they felt. Stephen Crane would change all that in his novel.
So, although the 21-year old writer had never been in a war and was writing about one that was fought before he was born, Crane described with uncanny accuracy the fears and sorrows, the cowardice and courage of the soldiers as they fought one of the war’s bloodiest battles-Chancellorsville.
Crane couldn’t interest book publishers in his story, so he sold it to a newspaper syndicate, and in December, 1894, The Red Badge of Courage appeared in serial form in over 700 newspapers. For his 18,000 word story, Crane was paid a half cent a word, for a total of $90!
The story was greeted with great enthusiasm, especially by many Civil War veterans, who insisted that Crane had to have been in the war himself to have described so accurately all that the soldiers felt.
Stephen Crane later did report on wars, in Cuba and in Greece. But these assignments left him with his own red badge-malaria and tuberculosis. These diseases led to his death in 1900, at the young age of 28.
During his short life, Crane also published four books of short stories and two books of poetry. But, he is best remembered for his classic American novel of the Civil War.
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