Volume 21, Number 2 · February 21, 1974
Gone With the Wind
By C. Vann Woodward
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War
by Daniel Aaron
Knopf, 385 pp., $12.50
One measure of the boldness of this enterprise is that it addresses virtually the same theme that Edmund Wilson treated in Patriotic Gore twelve years ago. In spite of its quirks, perversities, and pontifications, that was an impressive book, quite worthy of its author's reputation as the leading American literary critic of his time. No other study of literary sources has so deeply probed the apocalyptic zeals and furious mystiques that inspired the opposing sides in the American Civil War. With a blend of icy detachment and a passionate involvement rivaling their own, Wilson wrote about the anguish of the more sensitive participants, their dilemmas, inner conflicts, and delusions, their torments of conscience and confusions of purpose. Probably no other writer has come nearer to revealing the 'marked fascination' each camp had for the other and what Wilson called 'the intimate essence of a conflict which, though fratricidal, was also incestuous.'
Review, 3257 words
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