Stephen Crane, and if it was assigned in high school, I managed to skip it. I can see why it was revolutionary for its time for the psychological portrait of a youth in battle, but to this reader a hundred years on, it wasn't as impressive. Fine, but not awe-inspiring.
Afterward I took a multiple-choice quiz Sparknotes, which deliberately? mistakenly? has incorrect results. The red badge of courage is, no spoiler but obvious, a wound; it's a squirrel not a dog and a blue demonstration not a useless crew; and, unless I blindly misread my symbols, question 18 is way off. Reading on-screen, my eyes do tend to volley after my attention has lapsed, but I have more faith in my reading comprehension than that, and so the question scares me because maybe I shouldn't.