A Mystery of Heroism Study Guide

Stephen Crane was born the youngest of fourteen children to a Methodist minister father and a devout mother. Raised primarily by an older sister, Crane was a sickly but intelligent child who taught himself to read at the age of four. After spending two years as an undergraduate at Claverack College, Crane moved to New York City to work as a freelance writer. There, he published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893 under a pseudonym. The publication of his most famous novel The Red Badge of Courage two years later, in 1895, which focused on a soldier hoping to prove his bravery during the Civil War. That novel, quickly followed by his book of poems The Black Riders, raised him to international fame. However, after a series of scandals and accusations regarding Crane’s presence in brothels, which he said he frequented for research purposes, he traveled to Greece and Cuba to work as a war correspondent. After surviving a shipwreck and reporting on both the Greco-Turkish conflict and the Spanish-American War, Crane purchased an expensive home in Sussex, England and lavishly entertained his literary friends. Deeply in debt, he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. In his lifetime, he published three short story collections, two poetry collections, and five novels.

Though the battle that takes place during “A Mystery of Heroism” is unnamed, the soldiers’ names and weaponry used imply that it likely takes place during the American Civil War, as does Crane’s most famous novel The Red Badge of Courage. The soldier casualties of the Civil War are estimated at 620,000—around two percent of the population—with another 50,000 civilian deaths. The death toll was both unprecedented and still unmatched in any American conflict. Born six years after the end of the Civil War, Crane lived in an era greatly impacted by the incredible loss of life caused by the war and many of his teachers at Claverack College were veterans, all of which influenced the topic and themes of his fiction. The Civil War marked the end of the American Romantic movement—emphasizing imagination, emotion, and abolition—that dominated American literature from around 1820 and often romanticized war and treated soldiers as heroes. Crane was among the first writers of his era to depict the American Civil War, and war in general, as brutal, raw, and realistic, which played a role in ushering in a period of American Realism.

Many of the themes Crane explores in “A Mystery of Heroism”—including the grim realities of war and the mysteries and absurdities inherent in the seemingly simple concept of courage—he also explores in his novel The Red Badge of Courage and his other Civil War stories collected in the book The Little Regiment. Crane was greatly influenced by the writings of Hamlin Garland, who gave a manifesto of American realistic fiction in his 1894 essay collection Crumbling Idols. Crane’s work established him as a major figure in the mid-19th century movement of American Realism. This style, featuring ordinary people and harsh social realities, is found also in the works of writers such as Sam R. Watkins, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, and many others. Watkins’s memoir Co. Aytch considers the Civil War with frankness and realism, much as Crane does, in a period in which romanticizing war was popular. Bierce’s civil war stories similarly explore the absurdities and brutal realities of that and all wars, though Bierce, who fought in the Civil War, came to resent Crane’s popularity of Crane’s Civil War focused work especially because Crane was born after the war. Stephen Crane’s writing is believed to have influenced Earnest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a novel highlighting the waste of war, as well as other Modernist literature. “A Mystery of Heroism” can also be seen as having an influence on more recent novels such as Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel The Things They Carried, a collection of connected short stories which examine the psychological weight and absurdism of war.