The Red Badge of Courage takes place in the midst of the American Civil War. The Civil War was a different war, one much different than the people of America, or, for that matter, the people of the world had ever seen before. It was the first war in which the photograph was widely used, and the horrifying pictures taken by Matthew Brady and others of the time awakened people miles away from the conflict to the true consequences of war. It was a war of staggering casualties, a war in which one half of the nation was forced to destroy the other in order to win. Although literary accomplishments did come out of the war, such as Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems, for the most part it had temporarily halted literature; the Transcendentalist movement was essentially killed by the war and the bitter conflict in the years leading up to it. And while the war did awaken people to the consequences and the true aftermath of war, by the time Crane was finishing up his first major work, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in 1892, there was still no definitive portrayal of what it was like to be in that war. The paintings of the war that had been done up to that time, such as those of Louis Kurz, made the war look just as glorious and pristine as they made it look horrible. Some generals of the war had published or were publishing memoirs, which provided a good wide-sweeping view of the war, but a look at what the common man went through, a true look at the majority of the people involved in the war, was sorely lacking. And apparently, that is why Crane wrote his book.

According to Michael Shaara in his "To the Reader" in The Killer Angels, "Stephen Crane once said that he wrote The Red Badge of Courage because reading the cold history was not enough; he wanted to know what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what men’s faces looked like. In order to live it he had to write it." And write it he did. Not that it was quite the "instant success" that many think it was. As Colvert points out in his article on Crane’s life and work, "The first publication of The Red Badge of Courage…was irregular and discouraging. McClure’s Monthly accepted it, presumably intending to publish it as a serial. But after six months of waiting Crane…withdrew it and sold it for ninety dollars to Irving Bacheller, who carved away two-thirds of the text and distributed this abridged version to his newspaper syndicate" (113). However, in 1895, once Badge was turned into a book, it did get quite a bit of attention in society, and not just American society. As Colvert also notes, Crane had become an "international celebrity, known on both sides of the Atlantic for his uncompromisingly realistic portrayal of war" (116).

However, as is true with most works of a realistic "uncompromising" nature, the book was far from universally praised among those who were in other parts of society than the literary elite. As Ken Chowder notes in his article about Crane, "The book revolted the old guard of the military. A former general blasted it, writing that the hero "is an ignorant and stupid country lad…without a spark of patriotic feeling or even of soldierly ambition’ " (112). Not even all of Crane’s old literary friends completely enjoyed the work, as Colvert points out, as they apparently saw it as something of a departure from true realism, (116) as the book had symbolism and other unnecessary elements that are not needed to simply show "what it was like," which is generally the point of realism. The point was also made, of course, that as Crane had never himself been in a war, he could have no idea what it was like.

There were many reasons for the book’s success. As Ford Madox Ford points out, the world was going through a period of "war consciousness and war preparation such as the world had seldom seen" (135).Yet, part of what made The Red Badge of Courage so successful in the end was the very fact that as that former general pointed out, the youth of the story, Henry Fleming, was somewhat of an "ignorant and stupid country lad." The very problem before the publication of the book had been the absence of the young men of war in literature, the nameless ones. Crane had brought this to the public, and it connected to all people, people could see themselves in it. What person cannot envision him- or herself in the same situation as Henry when he finds himself charged by rebels and "was momentarily startled by a thought that perhaps his gun was not loaded? He stood trying to rally his faltering intellect so that he might recollect the moment that he had loaded, but he could not" (Crane 40). And part of what made the book so successful probably was the fact that it was not pure realism according to the strict definition. It was also to a degree a work of imagination and adventure, albeit a grim adventure. As Chowder noted, The Red Badge of Courage went through 14 printings in England in one year (111). A book that appeals only to the literary elite, or only to the wealthy, does not go through 14 editions in one year.

This is not to say the elite didn’t contribute to the praise at all. Crane’s contemporary George Wyndham, who helped generate the book’s success in England, noted, "Mr. Crane has surely contrived a masterpiece" (121). This praise was far from singular.

And through all this what did Crane himself think of his work? Well, apparently, he didn’t like it very much. "He complained about the war novel, as if he blamed it for the predicament it had put him in by making him an authority on war, which he had never seen, and by establishing him as a master of realism, whose first principles he had conspicuously violated" (Colvert 116).

So in the end, The Red Badge of Courage was not a book that caused social or political reform such as Arthur Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the earlier work, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and neither was it an uplifting piece that motivated people, such as Emerson’s The American Scholar. But it was a piece that defined a relatively new form of literature, realism, even if it was not the form of it Crane had originally intended. After The Red Badge of Courage the world’s view of the common man could not be the same, the view of war would not be the same. As Ford put it, "If before that date we had been asked how we should behave in war, we should…have answered that we should behave like demigods…But a minute after peeping into The Red Badge, we knew at best we should behave doggedly, but with weary non-comprehension" (135). This view of war affects us to this day.