The Veteran

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, the harrowing tale of a young soldier in battle during the Civil War, is a masterpiece of 19th-century naturalism. Crane attended a military prep school and was obsessed with war all his life, but he wrote the novel without ever having witnessed a battle--a fact he was always slightly defensive about. Before he began to write, however, he read extensively about the Civil War, particularly the memoirs of survivors that were popular in the late 19th century.