Stephen Crane with a cigarette.
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This excerpt is from the opening of Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. This was his second novel, published in 1895. After its publication, Crane traveled as a newspaper correspondent. His travels took him to Mexico, Cuba, and Greece. In 1897 he settled in England where he met Joseph Conrad and Henry James. He was only age 28 when he died in Germany. Crane had started smoking and drinking at the age of 6.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile campfires set in the low brows of distant hills.
Once a certain tall soldier developed virtues and went resolutely to wash a shirt. He came flying back from a brook waving his garment bannerlike. He was swelled with a tale he had heard from a reliable friend, who had heard it from a truthful cavalryman, who had heard it from his trustworthy brother, one of the orderlies at division headquarters. He adopted the important air of a herald in red and gold. "We're goin' t' move t' morrah--sure," he said pompously to a group in the company street. "We're goin' 'way up the river, cut across, an' come around in behint 'em."
To his attentive audience he drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down. Smoke drifted lazily from a multitude of quaint chimneys.
Related reading: Annie Dillard - Official Site; Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; Annie Dillard's Advice to Writers; The Descriptive Writing of Dorothy Sayers; Jonathan Swift's Descriptive Writing; Joseph Conrad's Descriptive Writing; The Descriptive Writing of Martha Grimes; Willa Cather's Descriptive Writing
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