The Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane

Jan 2011 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Scott Brick

About this audiobook

The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895, when its author, an impoverished writer living a bohemian life in New York, was only twenty-three. It immediately became a bestseller, and Stephen Crane became famous. Crane set out to create "a psychological portrayal of fear." Henry Fleming, a Union Army volunteer in the Civil War, thinks "that perhaps in a battle he might run....As far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself." And he does run in his first battle, full of fear and then remorse. He encounters a grotesquely rotting corpse propped against a tree, and a column of wounded men, one of whom is a friend who dies horribly in front of him. Fleming receives his own "red badge" when a fellow soldier hits him in the head with a gun. "The idea of falling like heroes on ceremonial battlefields," Ford Madox Ford remarked later, "was gone forever." Shelby Foote, author of The Civil
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About the author

Stephen Crane was born in 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. He attempted college twice, the second time failing a theme-writing course while writing articles for newspapers such as the New York Tribune. In 1892 Crane moved to the poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Bowery so vividly depicted in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In 1894 the serial publication began of The Red Badge of Courage, his acclaimed and widely popular novel of a young soldier’s coming of age in the Civil War. He died in Germany at the age of twenty-eight, in June of 1900.

Scott Brick, an acclaimed voice artist, screenwriter, and actor, has performed on film, television, and radio. His stage appearances throughout the US include Cyrano, Hamlet, and MacBeth. In the audio industry, Scott has won over 20 Earphones Awards, as well as the 2003 Audie Award in the Best Science Fiction category for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. After recording nearly 250 books in five years, AudioFile Magazine named Scott “one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy” and proclaimed him one of their Golden Voices. Brick’s range is unparalleled as he reads thrillers to narrative nonfiction, from biographies to science fiction with aplomb.