The Red Badge of Courage

A young private walks into his first battle certain that he will run, runs, and spends the rest of the book trying to come back from it. Crane was twenty-three and had never seen a war; he wrote from veterans' talk and photographs, and the men who had been at Chancellorsville took him for one of them. The wound of the title is one he does not earn — and the whole novel turns on that point. Fifty-seven paintings by Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson show Civil War camps, spinning yarns and whittling, the very scenes Crane's soldiers would have known.