Volume 41, Number 7 · April 7, 1994
The Inner Civil War
By C. Vann Woodward
'…the real war will never get in the books': Selections from Writers During the Civil War
edited by Louis P. Masur
Oxford University Press, 301 pp., $25.00
The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home
by Reid Mitchell
Oxford University Press, 201 pp., $25.00
For a century and more after the Civil War American critics have worried the question of why the experience never inspired a literary classic worthy of the subject. The first to broach the problem were those to whom it must have caused the greatest embarrassment—the writers who lived through the war themselves. It was they who most often demanded the 'masterpiece' that measured up to the experience. Some of them aspired to meet that need with a work of their own, but none claimed to have done so, and several lived to confess their failure. Others declared it would never be done. Thus William Dean Howells lamented his 'forever-to-be-unwritten novel,' and Walt Whitman believed that 'the real war' was beyond the reach of writers. The debate over the explanation continues to the present day. Optimists waited in vain for writers of the postbellum generations to fulfill their hopes. Stephen Crane came nearest perhaps, but Crane was no Tolstoy.
Review, 3240 words
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