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The Red Badge of Courage: The World of Henry Fleming Audiobook
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The Red Badge of Courage was Stephen Crane’s best known novel. It was one of his two great ones, the other being the underrated Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which was also a ground-breaking work, taking up the subject of women's plights in industrial society as Red Badge takes up men’s plight in wartime.
The story is a cerebral one, about what the protagonist, new recruit Henry Fleming, an 18-year-old Yankee, thinks. As in most Crane writing, most characters remain nameless, such as the Tall Soldier. The story starts with all the enthusiasm of newbies going to war. Then Fleming faces the boredom of military camp. As a writer famously said, 99% of the time is boredom, 1% terror. Crane introduces us to that subject through this novel.
In the first battle, Henry runs, but he is covered by the confusion and gets to return and reunite with his fellows. He picks up a fake injury to justify this by being bonked on the head by another retreating soldier.
In the last section, Fleming steps up as the flag carrier, fights well, and survives for another day. A later Crane short story, “The Veteran,” features Fleming as an older man, so presumably he survived the Civil War. But this is all left open ended in the novel, which only covers a few weeks time in the four-year war. Listen to “The Veteran” to see how it all turned out and was remembered.
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About Stephen Crane
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American novelist, poet, and journalist. He worked as a reporter of slum life in New York and a highly paid war correspondent for newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. He wrote many works of fiction, poems, and accounts of war, all well received but none as acclaimed as his 1895 Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Today he is considered one of the most innovative American writers of the 1890s and one of the founders of literary realism.
About Deaver Brown
Deaver Brown is an author and entrepreneur. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his books include Crucial Conversations, Presidential Wisdom, George Washington: Farewell Address, and numerous others.