Stephen Crane wrote the definitive Civil War novel without having experienced combat, rendering battle as confusion, terror, and accidental heroism. Young Henry Fleming enlists seeking glory and instead finds chaos—soldiers who can't see the battle they're in, fear that makes men run, courage that's mostly just forward motion born of desperation. Crane strips away romanticism to show war as it's actually experienced: disorienting, unheroic, and transformative in ways that have nothing to do with glory. This Civil War novel pioneered psychological realism in war literature and remains the most honest depiction of combat in American fiction.
 
 
 
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