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Informationen zum Autor Shelby Foote Klappentext Shelby Foote's monumental historical trilogy, "The Civil War: A Narrative," is our window into the day-by-day unfolding of our nation's defining event. Now Foote reveals the deeper human truth behind the battles and speeches through the fiction he has chosen for this vivid, moving collection. These ten stories of the Civil War give us the experience of joining a coachload of whores left on a siding during a battle in Virginia . . .marching into an old man's house to tell him it's about to be burned down . . .or seeing a childhood friend shot down at Chickamauga. The result is history that lives again in our imagination, as the creative vision of these great writers touches our emotions and makes us witness to the human tragedy of this war, fought so bravely by those in blue and gray.Introduction In the summer of 1862, following McClellan’s mauled retreatfrom the gates of Richmond, James Russell Lowell’s reply to his editor’s request for a poem was that he was “clear down to the bottom of the well, where I see the Truth too near to make verses of.” Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe—saluted by Lincoln in person as “the little lady who started this big war”—responded, when asked why she had not written a wartime sequel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Who could write fiction when life was so imperious and terrible?” Nathaniel Hawthorne, on the other hand, felt “mentally and physically languid” under pressure from the conflict, and though he died while Grant was outmaneuvering Lee down in Virginia, just short of a year before the finish, he did manage to produce an essay titled “Chiefly About War Matters” in which he confessed that “the Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a scattered dream as my unwritten Romance.” Nor did the end of the war provide any sudden correction of this blockage. Two years after Appomattox, William Dean Howells—assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly at thirty, soon to be editor-in-chief, and for the next forty years the acknowledged dean of American letters—declared that the war “has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has staggered very lamely.” Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, published a generation later in 1895, was the exception that proved the rule; the sluice gate opened only to close again. Indeed, Howell’s complaint is nearly as valid today as it was when he made it, just over 125 years ago. In this country, historical fiction has in general been left to second-raters and hired brains, and this is particularly true of those who have chosen the Civil War as a major subject. Aside from Crane, our best fiction writers have given it mere incidental attention or none at all. Hemingway is a case in point; so is Henry James. This is regrettable on several counts, especially to those who would understand our nation by learning just what happened during that blood-drenched era—good and bad things, both in abundance—to make us what we are. Facts we have had and are having in ever greater numbers, perhaps a glut, through the years leading up to and away from the Sumter centennial, when biographies, overall explications, and brochures came pouring in a torrent from the presses and binderies. Yet there is a multifaceted truth outside the facts—beyond them, so to speak, or hidden inside them—and of this we have had all too little, because in this respect our novelists have let us down. “I would rather have The Iliad,” a recent translator of Homer has said, “than a whole shelf of Bronze Age war reports.” So too, no doubt, would we; but there i...
