The Red Badge Of Courage By Stephen Crane

Realism is defined as “the quality or fact of representing a person, thing, or situation accurately or in a way that is true to life” (Dictionary). This way of displaying people or a situation in their true reality is recurrent in many works of literature. Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, a realistic novel that tells the honest horrors of the battlefield. Crane used his life influences of family, education, and society to shape him into the realistic writer that we see in The Red Badge of Courage.
Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey on November 1, 1871. His father, a Methodist minister, and his mother, a devout woman, had fourteen children; Crane being the youngest. Crane’s parents were both writers of religious work,
In 1888, Crane attended a military school, Hudson River Institute and Claverack College. At this school, Crane became interested in the studies of the Civil War and military training. This interest sparked the idea of writing stories about war. Following the military school, Crane attended Syracuse University for less than two years. Here, Crane’s studies further strengthened his desire for writing. However, Crane later decided that “humanity was a more interesting study than college curriculum” and quit school. He became a full time reporter with his brother and also a part time reporter for the New York Tribune. In New York, Crane became familiar with life in the Bowery, the slums of the city. His explorations of the streets opened Crane’s eyes to the writing style of realism. This introduction to realism inspired his many writings, one being The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen
When people first read it, they were impressed with Crane’s honest depiction of war and “insisted that Crane was a veteran of the Civil War,” when he actually had no personal experience of battle (Glencoe). William Dean Howells, a Harper’s Weekly writer, praised Crane’s novel, but he did not think Crane could be considered a realist writer. Howells thought that Crane was more of an impressionistic writer. Harold Frederic, editor of the New York Times, defined The Red Badge of Courage as a masterpiece. He said that “it would be one of the deathless books which must be read by everybody who desires to be, or to seem, a connoisseur of modern fiction,” and “it impels the feeling that the actual truth about a battle has never been guessed before” (Red Badge