America’s Greatest Conflict: Novels of the Civil War

Sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council and the North Carolina Center for the Book

Let’s Talk About ItL I B R A R Y D I S C U S S I O N S E R I E S

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L I B R A R Y D I S C U S S I O N S E R I E S

Sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council

and the North Carolina Center for the Book

America’s Greatest Conflict: Novels of the Civil War

SOMETIMES HISTORICAL FACTS ALONE ARE NOT ENOUGH TO EVOKE THE TRUTH OF THE PAST. Perhaps this is what Walt Whitman, a volunteer wound-dresser in the Civil War, meant when he claimed of the great conflict that the “real war will never get in the books.” Even for one of our greatest poets, the incendiary passions, outsized personalities, and crushing brutality of this epic conflict were beyond the power of words to describe. But this has not prevented generations of writers from trying. Although scholars and historians have written millions of pages about all aspects of the war, it has fallen to novelists to re-imagine the conflict in a way best designed to capture in vivid detail the momentous social upheaval of this greatest of American wars. Indeed, perhaps it is the novelist’s imagination that is best suited to communicate the incomprehensible vastness of the Civil War, the soldiers who fought it, and the civilians who endured it. In the hands of great novelists, the truth of this war may become as clear and persuasive as any monograph or biography.

The March, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, The Killer Angels, Enemy Women, and Lincoln’s Dreams present the efforts of five modern American novelists to describe and interpret different aspects of the Civil War. Designed to appeal to a broad range of readers, these books include a variety of approaches. Some of the stories address soldiers and battles; others involve civilians who dwelt in the troubled spaces between the battles. Some examine real historical events; others are almost wholly invented. Some feature important historical characters, like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, while others create a cast of fictional characters that

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nonetheless live in a real historical landscape. Whatever their differences, all the authors attempt to help Americans understand the experiences, ideas, and internal lives of ordinary men and women as they are swept through extraordinary times when brother fought brother on American soil.

Some common issues and questions will link the discussions of these disparate books. Why did men fight in the Civil War — was it a war about ideas, identity, economics? How did men and women experience the war differently? How did the war drive apart or bring together communities and families? And how do these visions of the past reflect our current American attitudes about race, politics, and war?

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The Marchby E. L. Doctorow

One of America’s greatest living novelists, E.L. Doctorow often uses history as a canvas upon which to paint remarkable stories that depict the best and worst of human nature. Doctorow’s novels usually are set in and around his own city of New York, but in The March he takes a grand departure from his old stomping grounds to follow the Union army of William Tecumseh Sherman on its epic march through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864–1865. The result is a modern masterpiece.

The March features Doctorow’s trademark method of mixing fact with fiction to create a moving narrative that communicates the sweep of history while telling an exciting tale. The book has a huge cast of characters — some historical, some invented — as they wind along their separate and conjoined destinies. There is Pearl, the escaped slave who finds freedom and opportunity with the Union forces. There are Arly and Will, two lost Confederate soldiers who are tossed about in the march’s wake. There is Wrede Sartorius, a mysterious Union Army doctor whose methods are ahead of his time. There is General Sherman, neither the monster of Southerners’ imagination nor the hero of Northern legend, but complicated, brilliant, wounded, and deeply human. And above all there is the Union army itself, which becomes a living, organic being on an odyssey of unceasing destruction. As these characters relate the history of Sherman’s march, the novel becomes a powerful meditation on the nature of war.

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On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon by Kaye Gibbons

One of the most acclaimed and accomplished contemporary authors, North Carolina native Kaye Gibbons has built her exemplary literary career upon characters and stories from the American South. Her debut novel, Ellen Foster, won international praise, and she has been producing remarkable fiction ever since. Her body of work uses the past and the present to explore the lives of tough, smart women who endure crises with their wits and abilities.

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is the story of a Southern woman named Emma Garnett Tate Lowell. Although she is the daughter of a privileged Virginia plantation upbringing, Emma is anything but Scarlett O’Hara. Her family life is dominated by her bullying, demanding father, who terrorizes everyone on the plantation — everyone except Clarice, the young slave woman who seems to have power over the entire household, white and black. With the help of Clarice and the Northern doctor Emma eventually marries, Emma escapes the minefield of her home life, only to find herself swept up in the devastation of the Civil War.

On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon adds complexity to the image of the Southern plantation lady and is a testament to the power of women to survive and triumph over the worst national and family traumas.

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The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

In the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, Michael Shaara lived an adventurous and eventful life that went beyond merely writing. Before becoming a professor of creative writing in 1960, Shaara was, at various times, a paratrooper, boxer, and police officer. In 1974, using his own experiences with life’s most dangerous and intense facets, Shaara wrote The Killer Angels, a novelized treatment of the Battle of Gettysburg. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, became an instant classic, and was made into the highly successful film Gettysburg in 1993.

The Killer Angels tells the story of Gettysburg from the perspective of a handful of characters, soldiers on both sides of the conflict. With compassion, insight, and a stunning eye for detail, Shaara paints a thrilling and balanced portrait of the battle that combines historical fact with vibrant imagination. In the process, Shaara manages to tell a fast-paced story brimming with action while simultaneously exploring the internal thoughts and emotions of men at war. Shaara’s battle scenes bring readers as close to the actual experience of combat as mere words can. But, more importantly, readers will close this book feeling as though they really know the men who fought this war, men whom heretofore were simply frozen in old photographs or vaulted on distant pedestals. In Shaara’s hands, the Civil War becomes both epic and personal, ultimately a story of courageous men committed to defend their competing visions of America.

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Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles

Poet Paulette Jiles came by her knowledge of Civil War-era Missouri the hard way — by exploring the ground, literally and figuratively. She rode across old Ozark trails on horseback, poked around out-of-the-way military graveyards, questioned genealogists and local historians, and scoured manuscripts. The end result is a brilliant historical novel in the tradition of Cold Mountain that examines a little-known aspect of the Civil War in a gritty, evocative, and realistic manner.

Jiles tells her story from the perspective of her heroine, Adair Colley, a spirited, courageous Southern woman living in Union-occupied Missouri. The novel follows Adair as she embarks on an epic quest to find her stolen horse, rescue her imprisoned father, and restore the life that has been destroyed by the Civil War. Through Adair’s dramatic exploits, readers learn that the role of women during the Civil War went far beyond the stereotypes of demur plantation mistresses, sainted widows, and stoic nurses. Adair and her sisters occupy a chaotic world within war, striving to survive in the crossfire between Union occupation troops, Confederate guerrillas, and lawless bandits. The daughters and wives of southeastern Missouri depicted in Enemy Women suffer all the hardships of the men with few of the traditional protections promised women by their nineteenth-century society. Nonetheless, these women show a remarkable ability to endure the harshness of war and retain their commitment to family, love, and community.

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Lincoln’s Dreamsby Connie Willis

Award-winning science-fiction author Connie Willis often uses the past to explore unusual realms of the present and the future. Many of her stories feature characters who commune with the past in strange ways. She says she wrote Lincoln’s Dreams because “the Civil War disturbs us, all these long years after, troubling our sleep. Like a cry for help, like a warning, like a dream.”

Jeff Johnson is a researcher for an historical novelist who spends his days tracking down obscure facts

about the Civil War — until one day he meets a young woman for whom the past isn’t dead, but a recurring nightmare that haunts her living present. Annie is plagued nightly by dreams which focus on dead soldiers, horrific battlefield carnage, and haunted locations from the Civil War. She is sure that the dreams mean something, are commanding her to do something. And so she seeks out help interpreting the historical context for her visions. “Tell me about the Civil War,” she asks Jeff, and from that moment on they embark on a desperate journey across old battlefields and through time to decode Annie’s dreams and give her peace. In the process, readers discover a somber connection between Annie’s tribulations and the haunted, tragic lives of real historic figures like Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s Dreams is one of the most unusual and powerful Civil War novels of recent years.

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