for the first time probably in my adult life, and i was reading a lot, and i was reading books that i had somehow missed and had always wanted to read. i finally read middlemarch, for god's sake, my wife's favourite novel. i finally read to the lighthouse by virginia woolf, which i find one of the most beautiful novels i've ever read in my life, a masterpiece. and one of the writers i went back to was stephen crane, whom i had not read since i was a teenager. and for those folks who don't know him, stephen crane died very young, in his late 20s... 28. ..of tuberculosis, but had already written some extraordinary books that perhaps the most famous of which was a take on fighting in the civil war, the red badge of courage, which he wrote never having been a soldier and certainly born long after the civil war was over.