The American novelist-journalist Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the war he memorialized in his acclaimed "The Red Badge of Courage", and died of tuberculosis at the age of 28. Recounting Crane's brief life, this book identifies a curious pattern: Crane tried to live what he had already written. Barely 22 when he wrote his major work, he later became the leading war correspondent of his time - in order to see, he told Joseph Conrad, whether "The Red Badge of Courage" was "all right". He took as his common-law wife the madam of a Jacksonville brothel and made a life with her in England, where their circle of friends included Conrad, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and H.G. Wells.