The Red Badge of Courage (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

CRANE, Stephen (intro. Carl Van Doren; illus. John Steuart Curry). The Red Badge of Courage. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1980.

Large Octavo. Full red leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Red moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. xiii, 170 pp. Sepia-tone illustrations and plates by John Steuart Curry throughout; frontispiece portrait of Crane by Edward Vebell. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series.

Stephen Crane was twenty-four years old when The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895. He had never witnessed combat. He had been born six years after the Civil War ended, in Newark, New Jersey, and had spent his short working life — he died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight — as a journalist in New York. What he produced from research, imagination, and an instinctive understanding of psychological states under extreme pressure was a novel unlike anything that had appeared in American literature before it: a work of sustained psychological realism that dispensed with the heroic conventions of war writing and replaced them with the fluctuating, self-deceiving, intensely subjective inner experience of a young soldier who is frightened, ashamed, brave, and confused in roughly equal measure.

Henry Fleming enlists in the Union Army with a head full of romantic notions about battle and glory. When his regiment first comes under fire he flees. The novel is largely the record of what follows: his rationalisation of his cowardice, his longing for a wound — the "red badge of courage" of the title — that would make him look like a veteran rather than a deserter, his gradual return to his regiment, and his discovery in subsequent engagements of something that might be called courage, though the novel is careful not to make that discovery feel entirely clean or complete. The writing operates through a series of disconnected impressions — the colour of smoke, the sound of cannon, the quality of light on a battlefield — that established a mode of representing combat consciousness that influenced Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the whole tradition of American war writing that followed.

The illustrations were produced by John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), one of the three central figures of American Regionalist painting alongside Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Curry was born in Kansas and is best known for his monumental murals of the American Midwest; his dramatic, large-scale compositions are particularly well-suited to the subject. The Easton Press edition reprints the 1944 Limited Editions Club production, for which Curry's illustrations were originally commissioned, with an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and biographer Carl Van Doren (1885–1950).

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000482