CRANE, Stephen.

£20,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Red Badge of Courage. First edition, first issue, very rare in the dust jacket. The story of a young Union Army private and his internal struggles, the novel "interprets military experience through the perspective of an untried volunteer who receives his wound-badge while fleeing from a battle but eventually proves himself by fighting bravely" (ANB). Its radical meld of psychological impressionism and bitter realism has influenced writers from Joseph Conrad to Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger.The book has its origins in Crane's boast, in 1891, that he could write a better battle story than Zola's La Débâcle. A contemporary review lauds Crane's triumph: "At times the description is so vivid as to be almost suffocating. The reader is right down in the midst of it, where patriotism is dissolved into its elements and where only a dozen men can be seen, firing blindly and grotesquely into the smoke. This is war from a new point of view" (New York Press, 13 October 1895). This copy has both points for the first issue: perfect type in the last line on page 225 and "Gilbert Parker's Best Books" listed at the top of the publisher's advertisement on page 235.

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