It's astounding how many "American classics" have been reissued in the 20th century in an edition matching the original manuscript after authors made compromises to get published. Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Melville's Billy Budd, and here Crane's Red Badge of Courage, all "improved with age" with new editions.
Crane's New Red Badge
On this day in 1982, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage was published by Norton and Company in "the only complete edition from the original manuscript." All previous editions incorporated all or most of the cuts and changes that had been made to Crane's manuscript for its original publication in 1895. Crane had made these changes, but many now agree that they were coerced by an editor with an eye to the marketplace, and were so significant as to distort and muddy the story Crane wrote and the theme he intended. The original edition, writes the Norton editor Henry Binder, remade Crane's hero into "a youth who finds courage and self-possession, instead of one who, if he changes at all, becomes at the end even more egotistical and obtuse than he is at the beginning."
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