Rare first edition book: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. First edition, first state (with title page printed in black and red, coated endpapers, unbroken type on page 225, and four pages of advertisements at rear, beginning with “Gilbert Parker’s Best Books”). NY: D. Appleton and Company, 1895. Hardcover bound in the publisher's original oatmeal buckram lettered in red, black, and gilt, with top edge stained yellow, 5.25 x 7.5, 233 pages. Book condition: VG/None, with spine darkened, slightly bumped at bottom front corner, and slight mottled discoloration to boards.
An outstanding, sought-after example of Crane's enduring work, praised in the Dictionary of American Biography as 'an extraordinary study of the common man amid the turmoil, clamor and distortion typified by war…its intensity, its startling yet inevitable descriptive phrase, struck a new note in American prose.'
