A review by piperkitty81
The Red Badge of Courage and Selected Short Fiction by Stephen Crane

5.0

I’m very glad I read this for the first time as an adult, as it would have been wasted on me in my teens. I used to find History so boring, until I started holding it my hands for work. The U.S. Civil War holds a special interest with me (even though I still suck at remembering names and dates) because I spent years doing historic conservation on a large collection of Civil War artifacts. Thanks to that, I could clearly picture the tools and weapons they used and also how devastating being hit by those projectiles were. I found this American Classic quite enthralling, reading the supposed inner thoughts, failures, and triumphs of “the youth”. The “other stories” were also well done, like snapshots of life, but then the “endings” were so abrupt that I was like “what?!” and turned the pages back and forth like “so what happened next?!” The stories were very...”human”? in a complex sort of way. Not sure if that makes sense or not, but the author had a gift and insight.