THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
AND OTHER STORIES
STEPHEN CRANE (1871–1900) was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was schooled at a Methodist seminary in New Jersey and then at Claverack College–Hudson River Institute, New York. After a brief and undistinguished period studying engineering at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and then as a science major at Syracuse University, Crane turned to journalism. Moving to New York City, he wrote for the New York Tribune, which in 1892 published five of his burlesque ‘Sullivan County Sketches’. While living in poverty in various rooming houses and tenements, he became friends with the established authors Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, who praised his first, privately printed novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). The massive popular success of his second novel, The Red Badge of Courage (begun 1893, serialized 1894, and published by Appleton 1895), led to an enhanced career as an intrepid feature-writer. His tour of the western states and Mexico in 1895 provided him with the basis for a number of stories such as ‘The Blue Hotel’ (1898), and his coverage of the Graeco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars allowed him to observe conditions of battle at first hand. In 1897 Crane and Cora Stewart, his common-law wife, left the United States for Britain, where Crane spent much of the last three years of his life. He died of tuberculosis, at the age of 28, in a sanatorium in the Black Forest, Germany. Crane’s other novels, George’s Mother (1896), The Third Violet (1896), and Active Service (1899), fell far short of the success achieved by The Red Badge of Courage. He also published five collections of stories and sketches, and two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind (1899). A fourth novel, The O’Ruddy, was left unfinished at the time of his death.
ANTHONY MELLORS is a poet and editor of fragmente: a magazine of contemporary poetics. He has taught English and American literature at the universities of Oxford and Durham, and at The Manchester Metropolitan University.
FIONA ROBERTSON is Research Professor at the University of Central England. Her edition of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor was published in Oxford World’s Classics in 1991.