The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Summary

“Holland” [Elisha J. Edwards]. “The Work of Stephen Crane.” Philadelphia Press, December 8, 1894, p. 7

The editorial comment published in The Press this morning upon the fiction of Stephen Crane, which is now appearing as a serial in The Press, justified what was said of that young author some months ago in this correspondence. Then it was predicted that Crane, if he was careful of his powers, subjected them to thorough discipline, would surely make a name for himself in American literature. He was a shy, almost nervous young man when I saw him and talked with him about the first of his works of fiction, which had been published only a few days.

It contained the evidences of great power, of real imagination, and a sort of poetic quality as well, which would be sure to take him out of the list of the perfunctory realists. At that time I saw the manuscript of the story that is now running in The Press as a serial. Then Mr. Crane had some purpose of publishing it in the first instance complete in book form. A hasty reading of the story very greatly impressed me. Here was a young man not born until long after the war days had closed, who nevertheless, by power of imagination, by a capacity intuitively to understand the impulses which prevailed in war days, had been able to write a story perhaps the most graphic and truthful in its suggestion of some of the phases of that epoch which has ever appeared in print.