A Literary Essay about The Red Badge of Courage Research Paper

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A Literary Essay about The Red Badge of Courage
The American Civil War (1861-1865) is a set of many stories of bloodshed, defeat, bravery and triumphal end of slavery that has inspired some well-known authors. One of them is Stephen Crane with his best-selling novel The Red Badge of Courage.
The Historical Context of the Novel
Long before the American Civil War started, the Northern and Southern states have had already unsettled social, political and economic issues. The economy of Northern states largely depended on industrial trade while the Southern counted in its crops such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco. With the issuance of tariffs, the Southerners believed that it only favored the economy of Northerners. Furthermore, the origin of the war was the widely disputed slavery—the Northern states were strongly against it while the Southern states were taking advantage of it. Finally, the winning of Abraham Lincoln as the president, who was an anti-slavery advocate, caused the secession of eleven Southern States that ignited the war on April 1861 at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The war lasted for four years, and on April 1865, General Robert E. Lee, leader of Southern Confederate forces surrendered to U.S. General Ulysses Grant. Although the war succeeded in freeing the slaves, it is considered the bloodiest war in the American history that left millions of lives shattered (Crane x-xi).
Meanwhile, many people presumed that Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage narrated the Battle of Chancellorsville which took place on May 2-4, 1862 at Virginia. The place was surrounded by thick forest wherein Union soldiers retreated, and many Confederate soldiers died—which were congruently described in the novel.
Biography and Works of Stephen Crane
Six years after the war, Crane was born on November 1, 1871, at Newark, New Jersey to Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane and Mary Helen Peck Crane, who worked as newspaper and journal writer, and was the youngest among the fourteen children. The Crane family had moved to three towns of New Jersey and New York due to his father’s appointment to different churches. Moreover, at a young age, Stephen had already endured hardships and poverty with the early death of his father. Unhindered with their difficulties, Stephen pursued his passion for literature, and at the age of seventeen, he already worked as a writer for a local news bureau run by his brother. His love for reading and writing, however, overshadowed his interest in studying that resulted in him to drop-out to two schools, namely: Lafayette College, where he took up engineering, and Syracuse University. On 1891, Stephen became a full-time newspaper writer in New York, and he began to write his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, writing about a poor woman in a hopeless situation. Two years after, Stephen, out of his penury, published his first novel by borrowing the money left by his late mother as his small inheritance. A year later he was able to publish The Red Badge of Courage as a series in a few newspapers.
Moreover, in 1895, D. Appleton and Company agreed to publish the whole novel. Other literary works of Stephen Crane include Th...