1871-1900 · American novelist, poet and journalist, author of The Red Badge of Courage
About Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was born in Newark, New Jersey, the youngest of fourteen children of a Methodist minister. He worked as a newspaper reporter in New York, published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets at his own expense in 1893, and wrote The Red Badge of Courage without having seen a battle. Its success made him a war correspondent in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and the Spanish-American War of 1898; his shipwreck off Florida in 1897 became the story The Open Boat. He died of tuberculosis at Badenweiler, Germany, at the age of twenty-eight.
The Red Badge of Courage follows Henry Fleming, a young private of the 304th New York, through two days of fighting in an unnamed Civil War battle that readers have long identified with Chancellorsville in May 1863. Crane calls him almost always simply the youth.