Uncommon book: The Red Badge of Courage. Second edition, early printing. NY: D. Appleton & Co., 1896. Hardcover custom bound in three-quarter morocco with gilt-decorated spine and top edge gilt, 5 x 7.25, 233 pages. Signed on a bound-in LS, "Stephen Crane," one page, Hartwood, New York, June 6, 1896, to Edward Peterson, in full: "I attended the Syracuse University during the winter of 90 and 91." Autographic condition: fine. Book condition: VG/None, with edgewear and worn joints; the binding is tight. Effectively, the volume presents as a signed book—a sought-after example of Crane's enduring Civil War 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.'
After one semester at Lafayette College, Stephen Crane transferred to Syracuse University in 1890, where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate in the College of Liberal Arts. He attended just one class (English Literature) during the middle trimester, and remained in residence at the Delta Upsilon fraternity house while taking no courses in the third. Crane concentrated primarily on his writing, experimenting with tone and style. Shortly after publishing a piece of short fiction, 'Great Bugs of Onondaga,' simultaneously in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the New York Tribune in 1891, he declared college a 'waste of time' and left for good to to work as a reporter and writer.
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