Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, Masur captures the reactions, as the war was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott.

"This book is a welcome addition to my list of Civil War volumes. It provides students with the perspectives of participant observers. It will be part of the required reading for my Civil War course."--Gregory B. Padgett, Ph.D., Eckerd College "This is an excellent and eclectic collection of important perspectives on the Civil War. The editor has achieved a careful balance in the tone and content of the works included in this very useful volume."--Professor Kenneth M. Startup, Williams Baptist College "Readers with a genuine interest in the Civil War have already made this title something of a bestseller. It adds a new dimension to a familiar story, gives new insight into well-known thinkers, and introduces a few who are less famous."--KLIATT "An excellent contribution to Civil War literature...Helps to evoke that rare fullness that historians have been trying to create for over a century. His careful selection of writers and perceptive use of literary analysis will provide historians of the Civil War with new points of departure."--The Civil War News "An illuminating sampling of the Civil War writings of 14 of the most respected and influential literary artists of that period...By including selections from a racial, regional, and sexual cross section of the Civil War population, Masur has attempted to provide a balanced overview of a crucial point in America history. Since this anthology is limited exclusively to writings penned during the course of the Civil War, the reader is treated to intimate and immediate impressions of that schismatic conflict. Highly recommended."--Booklist "In this handy volume, Masur brings together the wartime prose and poetry of several prominent authors to set forth a literary dimension to the American Civil War. Excerpts of letters, articles, diary entries, and poems from figures ranging from Henry Adams, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and William Gilmore Simms to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman reveal that writers did set down their thoughts abut the war....Makes available to a wide audience some of the best contemporary writing about the conflict."--Library Journal "Louis Masur does us a real service in compiling this collection, which takes us backstage into the more or less private lives of fourteen major writers of the Civil War period. Sections from their diaries, letters, and occasional essays go far toward explaining why so little creative work got done by most of them, tossed about as they were by what Hawthorne called 'the hurricane that is sweeping us...into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my unwritten Romance.' I for one am thankful for having all this rich amterial gathered at last within easy reach."--Shelby Foote, author of The Civil War: A Narrative "Louis Masur's anthology illuminates the 'real' Civil War as perceived by fourteen sensitive and gifted writers, some of them neglected or forgotten, who observed it close at hand or from the domestic front. His discriminating selections and concise introductions give this engrossing book a special distinction."--Daniel Aaron, author of The Unwritten War: American Writers & the Civil War "We see the war intimately and with a degree of startling, sometimes shocking, immediacy that is not found in historical texts...A valuable literary assessment...Distinctive, honest, personal, and eminently readable."--United Methodist Reporter

Louis Masur is Associate Professor of History at City College of New York. He is the author of Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (Oxford, 1989).