The 24 year old Crane wrote a classic war novel without ever having been in combat. The story of Henry Fleming, a young farmer from upstate NY, who joins the Union Army at a tender age (he’s referred to as ‘the youth’ throughout the book and we only learn his name nearly ¾ of the way through the novel) and spends hours trying to anticipate how he will react under fire. Henry flees his first encounter but returns to his regiment and leads them into battle exhibiting bravery and wild courage. The book is incredibly visual and realistic in its depiction of the heat, chaos and incoherence of battle, describing both courage and cowardice with equal vividness. The book leads to admiration for men who can summon the wherewithal to fight but ultimately is about the barbarity of war. One of the final paragraphs has Fleming talking to himself as follows: “He would no more stand upon places high and false, and denounce the distant planets. He beheld that he was tiny but not inconsequent to the sun. In the space-wide whirl of events, no grain like him would be lost.   With this conviction came a store of assurance.”