Written by a youth who had scarcely passed his majority, this book has
been compared with Tolstoy's "Sebastopol" and Zola's "La Debacle," and
with some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. The comparison with
Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so.
Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they
apply themselves to a devoted--almost obscene--study of corpses and
carnage generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy
commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his
realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept down
where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are accomplished with
studied awkwardness.

Crane was an obscure free-lance when he wrote this book. The effort, he
says, somewhere, "was born of pain--despair, almost." It was a better
piece of work, however, for that very reason, as Crane knew. It is far
from flawless. It has been remarked that it bristles with as many
grammatical errors as with bayonets; but it is a big canvas, and I am
certain that many of Crane's deviations from the rules of polite
rhetoric were deliberate experiments, looking to effect--effect which,
frequently, he gained.

Stephen Crane "arrived" with this book. There are, of course, many who
never have heard of him, to this day, but there was a time when he was
very much talked of. That was in the middle nineties, following
publication of "The Red Badge of Courage," although even before that he
had occasioned a brief flurry with his weird collection of poems called
"The Black Riders and Other Lines." He was highly praised, and highly
abused and laughed at; but he seemed to be "made." We have largely
forgotten since. It is a way we have.