Maggie. A young Union soldier, Henry Fleming, tells of his feelings when he is under fire for the first time during the battle of Chancellorsville. He is overcome by fear and runs from the field. Later he returns to lead a charge that re-establishes his own reputation as well as that of his company. Henry Fleming has joined the Union army because of his romantic ideas of military life, but soon finds himself in the middle of a battle against a regiment of Confederate soldiers. Terrified, Henry deserts his comrades. Upon returning to his regiment, he struggles with his shame as he tries to redeem himself and prove his courage. "A powerful, severe, and harshly comic portrayal of Irish immigrant life in lower New York exactly a century ago."—Alfred Kazin. Although fellow novelists William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland immediately recognized genius in the twenty-one-year-old author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in 1893 most readers were unwilling to accept its unconventional theme and were uneasy with a style that was at once darkly naturalistic and vividly impressionistic. Today Maggie is esteemed as an American classic, the first of an impressive group of works in which Crane explored the underside of urban life, portraying the rise of the metropolis as it alters not just the human environment but human nature itself.