The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

Everything that appeared innovative in writing which came out a generation later is present in his “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893) and “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895). No, Auster plainly loves Crane-and wants the reader to-for Crane’s own far-from-sweet sake.Īnd Auster is right: Crane counts. The quotations from Crane’s harsh, haiku-like poems spit out from Auster’s gently loquacious pages in unmissable disjunction. A postmodern luxuriance of reference and a plurality of literary manners is central to Auster’s own writing in this book, the opening pages alone offer a list of some seventy-five inventions of Crane’s time.

Indeed, Crane got this kind of homage in a brief critical life from the poet John Berryman in the nineteen-fifties, a heavily Freudian interpretation in which Berryman was obviously identifying a precedent for his own cryptic American poetic vernacular in Crane’s verse collections “The Black Riders” and “War Is Kind.”īut Auster, voluminous in output and long-breathed in his sentences, would seem to have little in common with the terse, hard-bitten Crane. Mencken, praising an inheritance of bile alleviated by humor. And so we get John Updike on William Dean Howells, extolling the virtues of charm and middle-range realism, or Gore Vidal on H. Usually, when a well-established writer turns to an earlier, overlooked exemplar, there is an element of self-approval through implied genealogy: “Meet the parents!” is what the writer is really saying. A detailed, nearly eight-hundred-page account of the brief life of the author of “ The Red Badge of Courage” and “The Blue Hotel,” augmented by readings of his work, and a compendium of contemporary reactions to it, it seems motivated purely by a devotion to Crane’s writing. Paul Auster’s “ Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane” (Holt) is a labor of love of a kind rare in contemporary letters.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane