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Zusatztext An excellent! concise biography of Lee! one that will surely satisfy the general reader looking for a well-written and accessible account. ( The Denver Post ) A meditation on the life of a hero too human to be left to hagiographers. ( The Dallas Morning News ) Informationen zum Autor Roy Blount, Jr., grew up in Georgia and served in the army before becoming a celebrated humorist and cultural journalist. He has written for magazines as diverse as Sports Illustrated and The New York Review of Books and is the author of numerous books that include his recent memoir Be Sweet . Klappentext A "witty, lively and wholly fascinating" ( The New York Times ) portrait of an iconic Southern hero With lively storytelling and full-hearted Southern directness, Roy Blount, Jr., presents a unique portrait of Robert E. Lee. Fascinated by the qualities that made Lee such a charismatic, though reluctant, leader, Blount vividly conveys Lee's audacity and uncanny successes in battle, as well as his humility, his quirky sense of humor, and the sorrowful sense of responsibility he felt for his outnumbered, half-starved army. The first concise biography of this American legend, Robert E. Lee will appeal to history and military buffs, students of Southern culture, and every reader curious about the makeup of a man who has become an American icon. CHAPTER ONE It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. -Robert E. Lee, at Fredericksburg Shut up, Bobby Lee. It's no real pleasure in life. -The Misfit, in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" In his dashing (if sometimes depressive) antebellum prime, he may have been the most beautiful person in America, a sort of precursor-cross between England's Cary Grant and Virginia's Randolph Scott. He was in his element gossiping with belles about their beaux at balls. In theaters of grinding, hellish human carnage he kept a pet hen for company. He had tiny feet that he loved his children to tickle. None of these things seems to fit, for if ever there was a grave American icon, it is Robert Edward Lee-hero of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, a unifying national figure for a century or so thereafter, and currently a symbol of nobility to some, of slavery to others. After Lee's death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation's most prominent African American, wrote, "We can scarcely take up a newspaper...that is not filled with nauseating flatteries" of Lee, from which "it would seem...that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven." Two years later one of Lee's ex-generals, Jubal A. Early, apotheosized his late commander as follows: "Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime." In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt expressed mainstream American sentiment in a letter to the Committee of Arrangement for the Celebration of the Hundredth Anniversary of Lee's birth: General Lee has left us the memory, not merely of his extraordinary skill as a General, his dauntless courage and high leadership... but also of that serene greatness of soul characteristic of those who most readily recognize the obligations of civic duty....He stood that hardest of all strains, the strain of bearing himself well through the gray evening of failure; and therefore out of what seemed failure he helped to build the wonderful and mighty triumph of our national life, in which all his countrymen, north and south, share. Teddy Roosevelt, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and President Harry S. Truman had at least three things in common with Lee: They were all brave soldiers, staunch leaders of men, and, in no pejorative sense, mama'...
