Even before the first cannonballs were fired at Fort Sumter, American writers were trying to make creative sense of the War Between the States. These thirty-one stories were culled from hundreds that circulated in popular magazines between 1861 and the celebration of the American centennial in 1876. Arranged to echo the sequence of the unfolding drama of the war and Reconstruction, together these short stories constitute an "inadvertent novel," a collective narrative about a domestic crisis that was still ongoing as the stories were being written and published. The authors, who include...
Even before the first cannonballs were fired at Fort Sumter, American writers were trying to make creative sense of the War Between the States. These ...
