Audiobook · read by volunteers
Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
Read by James Smith, JemmaBlythe, Joseph Loverti, Julian Jamison, Dusty Hodge, Nikolle Doolin, Kirk Thomas, Jim Morris-Knower, lolhypocrisy, mawrtea · 24 chapters · 4 h 55
About the book
A young farm boy named Henry Fleming enlists in the Union army, dreaming of glory. Then he meets the reality of battle: the noise, the smoke, the fear, and the strange, shifting nature of courage itself. Stephen Crane's short novel does not show a war from above, with generals and maps and grand strategy. It stays close to one frightened and inexperienced soldier, and lets us watch what goes on inside him as his regiment waits, advances and breaks. Published in 1895, it was among the early books to treat war as a psychological ordeal rather than a stage for heroes. The prose is spare, vivid and full of colour, and the questions it asks remain pressing. In twenty-four brief chapters, it takes under five hours to hear, and it is hard to forget.
Introduction
Stephen Crane lived from 1871 to 1900, a life of only twenty-eight years, yet he left a mark on American writing out of all proportion to its length. A journalist and a poet as well as a novelist, he was a leading American writer of a plain, unsparing realism, and his work is often linked with the beginnings of literary modernism in the United States.
The Red Badge of Courage appeared in 1895. It is based loosely on the Battle of Chancellorsville, fought during the American Civil War, though the novel never names the battle and gives its characters only the barest of identities. Crane was born years after the war ended and had never seen combat when he wrote it; the book's authority comes from imagination and from careful attention to the accounts of veterans. Its first readers, including some who had fought, praised its truthfulness, and it made Crane famous both in America and abroad.
Unlike many earlier war narratives, the novel is not interested in the big picture or in the glory of war. It is concerned with psychology: with how one young man's feelings of fear, shame and pride change from hour to hour. Crane's descriptions of light, smoke and colour give the story an almost painterly quality.
This LibriVox recording divides the book into its twenty-four chapters and lasts about five hours. It makes a gripping and compact listen for anyone interested in war, memory or the making of modern fiction.
Public domain
Stephen Crane died in 1900: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text