"Cliff Notes - Red Badge of Courage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

STEPHEN CRANE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS
TIMES

When The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895 (it first
came out in installments in a Philadelphia newspaper at the end
of 1894), the Civil War had been over for thirty years. In some
ways Americans were forgetting the war. In the South, whites
tried to undo some of the war's effects. By the 1890s many of
the old Confederate leaders were back in power, and blacks had
lost their right to vote, and couldn't go to school with whites.
But in other ways Americans liked to remember the Civil War. In
little towns in New England and the Middle West they built
monuments to Civil War dead--something they had not done after
the Revolution or the War of 1812. Stories about the war were
tales of bravery and heroism. Its songs were stirring anthems
like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Imagine, then, how shocking it must have been to turn the
pages of The Red Badge of Courage. Here was a novel where you
didn't even find out the hero's name--if you could call a boy
who ran away from battle a hero--until halfway through the book.
Instead of being wounded by Confederate fire, this so-called
hero gets his "red badge of courage" from a panicked fellow
soldier. Henry Fleming's best friend, the tall soldier, Jim
Conklin, dies horribly, jerking around alone in the middle of a
field, rather than expiring decorously in Henry's arms with his
mother's name on his lips. When Henry overhears a general
speaking with his aide, he wants to know when he's getting his
cigars, not about the progress of the battle. And as if it
weren't enough that this Stephen Crane stripped away the glories
of war, who had ever written in such language? Most novels were
graced by flowing sentences, ample paragraphs, and chapters it
took a whole evening to read. What was this? Who had ever
heard anything as weird as Crane's language?

Those of us who watched "M*A*S*H" or read Catch-22 are not
shocked by Crane's vision of war. But readers in 1895 couldn't
wait to find out who Stephen Crane was. One veteran insisted
that Crane had been in his regiment at Antietam (one of the
great battles of the Civil War). He was wrong. Stephen Crane
was a twenty-four-year-old journalist who had never seen a
battle, much less fought in one; a young man who had flunked out
of two colleges, where he had displayed more talent for playing
baseball and drinking beer than for writing. (Several years
later, after Crane covered a war in Greece as a journalist, he
confessed with relief to his friend, the English novelist Joseph
Conrad, that "The Red Badge of Courage is all right.")

So how did a twenty-four-year-old who had never seen combat