OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL
Allan Gurganus
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989
718 pp., $21.95
Despite all that has happened since, the Civil War is still the central episode of American history. More men and resources were mobilized for that struggle and the casualties were greater, compared to the population at the time, than in any other war in American history, including World Wars I and II. And the Civil War still contains the fundamental knot of debate (and that in no simple way) on many of the major issues with which the American republic has struggled--modernization versus tradition, the meaning of the Constitution, consolidation of power versus its dispersal, ideals versus realities, and the position of minorities in American society.
It is not surprising that the war has generated a huge literature. It is said that more books have been written about the American Civil War than any other subject except for the Christian religion. And this refers just to the struggle of 1861-1865 and its immediate causes and aftermath. If we expand the category to include the Old South, slavery, and Reconstruction, the volume of words expands to staggering proportions.
And I am referring here only to nonfiction. Another vast subject is opened up when we consider the Civil War as stimulus and subject matter for creative literature, both popular and serious. Consider that the all-time best-seller of the earlier nineteenth century was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. A major international bestseller of the later nineteenth century was another melodramatic Old South novel, St. Elmo, by the once renowned but now forgotten August Jane Evans Wilson of Mobile, Alabama.
The greatest production of early American film, in both artistry and influence, was The Birth of a Nation, a Civil War and Reconstruction epic based upon a novel by southerner Thomas Dixon, called The Clansman. And no contemporary reader needs to be reminded of the fame of Gone With the Wind, both book and movie, and Roots, the most popular television drama of all time. Clearly the war runs deep in the American consciousness.
The works mentioned made an indelible impression on the popular imagination and live in that realm. In the realm of serious literature, also, the war has been an enduring subject. To begin with the participants who turned their experiences into fiction (not even to mention poets, like northerner Walt Whitman and southerner Henry Timro), we have John W. DeForest, Albion W. Tourgee, Ambrose Bierce, and John Esten Cooke.
In time, American writers outside the South found other subjects, but southern writers have continued to be involved with the war, directly or indirectly, unable to escape the trauma and often unheeding of the wise saying of Novalis: "After losing a war, one should write comedies."
The Civil War is a brooding presence in all the works of William Faulkner, of course, but it surfaces frequently too in the work of Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Waren, Shelby Foote, Caroline Gordon, Mary Lee Settle--the list goes on and
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