Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane had a relatively short life and so a short career. Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1871 and died in 1900. He moved to New York City and lived as a free lance writer for newspapers. He used his position to study the conditions on the Bowery and wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets based on what he learned there. This was in 1891 and was his first novel. He was fired from his newspaper job, and in fact, he was not successful as a reporter, for what he wrote was usually rich in impressions but often lacked the basic facts of the event.

Crane was born after the Civil War, but it always fascinated him. He read widely on the subject, and he also held endless conversations with Civil War veterans. The book he wrote on the subject, The Red Badge of Courage, would be the first to tell not just what a soldier did but how he felt. The book was first published in installment form in the Philadelphia Press, and the work would not appear in book form until 1895 while the authors was traveling in the West, the southwest, and Mexico. Crane achieved success and fame with this work, but he still never managed to make much money from his work.

The Gilded Age was the name given to the period around 1870 when considerable cynicism set in about politics and other aspects of society. Mark Twain used the term as the title for a book, an attack on the materialism, speculation, and corruption seen in the era after the Civil War (Howard 200). In literary terms, t

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the source of the title and the state of mind of the hero at this point in the battle. 2. "On the other side of the fire the youth observed an officer asleep, seated bolt upright, with his back against a tree." (58) --Here Henry begins to see a relationship between the officers and the soldiers as all are sleeping. 3. "Oh, they'll fight all right, I guess, after they get into it." (7) --This general comment by Jim suggests the untried nature of these troops and the hope that they will do well when the time comes. It also suggests that Jim is a veteran who has seen all this before. 4. "The fight was lost. The dragons were coming with invincible strides. The army, helpless in the matted thickets and blinded by the overhanging night, was going to be swallowed. War, the red animal, the blood-swollen god, would have bloated fill." (52) --Crane here compares war to a ravening beast, and Henry uses this metaphor several times in the course of the story. Crane deals here with the nature of war and its effects on those who experience it. 5. "Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him . . . It was a goddess, radiant, that bended its form with an imperi

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