The Red Badge of Courage - Legacy

Legacy

Crane himself later wrote about the novel: "I don't think The Red Badge to be any great shakes but then the very theme of it gives it an intensity that the writer cant reach every day." For the remainder of Crane's short career—he died from tuberculosis at the age of 28—The Red Badge of Courage served as the standard against which the rest of his works were compared. Appleton republished the novel again in 1917, shortly after the U.S. entered World War I, reissuing it three additional times that same year.

Since the resurgence of Crane's popularity in the 1920s, The Red Badge of Courage has been deemed a major American text, and Crane's most important work. While modern critics have noted Crane's "anticipation of the modern spectacle of war", others—such as Crane scholar Stanley Wertheim—believe the work to be "unquestionably the most realistic novel about the American Civil War". Donald Gibson called the novel "ahead of its time" because it did "not conform to very many contemporary notions about what literature should be and do." The novel has been anthologized numerous times, including in Ernest Hemingway's 1942 collection Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. In the introduction, Hemingway wrote that the novel "is one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is." Robert W. Stallman's introduction to the Modern Library's 1951 edition of The Red Badge of Courage contained one of the first modern assessments of the novel.

The novel has been adapted several times for the screen. A 1951 film by the same name was directed by John Huston, starring Medal of Honor-winner Audie Murphy as Henry Fleming. Written by Huston and Albert Band, the film suffered from a troubled production history, went over budget, and was cut down to only seventy minutes despite objections from the director. A made-for-television movie was released in 1974, starring Richard Thomas as Fleming, while the 2008 Czech film Tobruk was partly based on The Red Badge of Courage.