The Red Badge Of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage is now universally recognized as a masterpiece, although when it first appeared
in book form in 1896 (two months later in England than in the United States) it provoked mixed reactions.
The English critics, in fact, brought it to the attention of the American public, which had generally ignored
it. Those early readers who approved saw in it a "true and complete picture of war," a book which "thrusts
aside romantic machinery" in favor of dramatic action and photographic revelation. Its critics attacked it for
what they considered its utter lack of literary form - its "absurd similes," "bad grammar," and "violent
straining after effect." Edward Garnett, however, praised its "perfect mastery of form," and Conrad, who
had known Crane, said in 1926 that The Red Badge of Courage was a "spontaneous piece of work which
seems to spurt and flow like a tapped stream from the depths of the writer's being," and he found it "virile
and full of gentle sympathy!
" while it was happily marred by no "declamatory sentiments." Throughout the first four decades of the
century the book was variously praised and condemned for its naturalism or "animalism," its realism and its
extraordinary style. V. S. Pritchett, writing in 1946, may be said to represent the prevailing opinion when
he declares that Crane's "verisimilitude," his grasp of "human feelings," and his "dramatic scenes and
portraits" give The Red Badge of Courage a place in t...

The Red Badge Of Courage

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