Conrad said that The Red Badge of Courage burst upon the public with ‘the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive’. An apt image, not only for the book, but for Stephen Crane himself, who, by projecting his own inner warfares into a variety of fictional settings, exerted a decisive, and explosive, influence on the development of American literature – perhaps even on the innovations of twentieth-century prose. There had never been a book quite like The Red Badge of Courage. This is how H. L. Mencken remembers its effect on the literary atmosphere of the time. ‘It gave the whole movement of the nineties a sudden direction and a powerful impulse forward. At one stroke realism was made its goal – not the old flabby, kittenish realism of Howells's imitators … but the sterner, more searching realism that got under the surface.’ Mencken is not being quite fair to Howells, as we can learn from a letter written by Crane in 1894 in which he says: