Red Badge of Courage

Original Paragraph:

He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip. The youth gave a shriek as he confronted the thing.

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When I read this part of the story, I almost gagged. It is so graphic it almost made me sick. I was really glad that it was a book and not a movie. It made me try to picture what I would have done if I had encountered that corpse myself. I would have probably had a heart attack upon seeing it. I would have been curious enough to look at it, but as soon as I did, I would have regretted it. I would have screamed and ran once the meaning of that sight hit home base.

Gone With The Wind

Original Paragraph:

Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin--that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

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Destiny was the most pure type of beautiful; she could captivate any man, but he always had to have a second look first. Her face was very lightly tinted, with a crop of copper colored freckles dusting her cheeks. She had long lashes, and they were a light golden color. Her eyebrows were the same shade of gold, and naturally beautiful; for they had never met a pair of tweezers. Her long, curly hair was the color of the sunset in her old Kentucky home, a deep reddish brown. Her skin was as white and pure as a pearl, not in the least tan-able. Her beauty was pure and without a molecule of makeup. It just took the men a few minutes to realize it.