The unwritten war; American writers and the Civil War

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I. "They break the lines of union" : Writers and politics: Taking sides ; The fallen angel and the risen saint

The "Wholesome calamity": William Gilmore Simms and Southern wrongs ; George Templeton Strong

reluctant abolitionist ; Yankee literati and the "Holy War"

Dr. Holmes ; James Russell Lowell

agitator-conservator ; Emerson goes to war. II. A philosophical view of the whole affair : Hawthorne: lonely dissenter: Naturalist ; Chiefly about war matters ; The terrible allegory

Whitman: the "Parturition Years": Sounding the tocsin ; Blacks and abolitionists ; "Deaths, operations, sickening wounds" ; War

"The real article" ; "Lincoln's man" ; The convulsive years

Melville: the conflict of convictions: Melville and Whitman ; Battle-pieces as a war narrative ; "Through terror and pity" ; Prophecies and misgivings. III. The "malingerers" : Henry Adams: The young strategist ; Qualms and indecisions ; The House of Adams victorious ; Prospects and portents ; The unwanted man

Henry James: The wound ; Father and sons ; "The consecrating sentiment" ; "A poor worm of peace" ; The blighted South

William Dean Howells: The inglorious assignment ; Rediscovering the enemy ; The war assessed ; Literary consequences

Mark Twain: The Comic mask ; Mark Twain's "campaign" ; Huck and Tom ; The fable of catastrophe. IV. Drawing-room warriors and combatants : Gentlemen of peace and war: The "elevated" view

Stedman, Taylor & Co. ; War poets on sea and land

H.H. Brownell and N.S. Shaler ; Gentlemen-soldiers

Captain O.W. Holmes, Jr., and others

John W. De Forest: A volunteer's adventures ; Whites and blacks in pre-war Dixie ; The war in document and fiction ; The recorders

trashy and true

Ambrose Bierce: "Salad days" ; War internalized ; The volunteer remembers ; Soldiers v. civilians ; "A land of peace and pensions"

Albion W. Tourgée in fact and fiction ; Tourgée's "History" ; Racism and the future. V. The war at second hand : Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic: Recruits and veterans ; Henry Fleming's "conversion" ; Mutual admirers ; The war in Dearborn County ; Copperheads and deserters ; A dissenting voice. VI. The South: Onlookers and participants : Writers in the Confederacy: South Carolina Quixote ; The promised renascence ; Timrod's war ; Launching the legend

The unwritten novel: Cooke's Cavaliers ; Richard Taylor

ironist ; David Hunter Strother

realist ; Mrs. Chesnut's South ; Mrs. Chesnut maps a story ; Mrs. Chesnut's unfinished "novel"

Sidney Lanier: The great wind ; Tiger-lilies and the allegory of war

George Washington Cable: The un-Southern Confederate ; Cable on the "lost cause" ; The grandissimes. VII. Reconstructing the Southern past : The neo-Confederates: "A holy conviction makes a holy cause" ; A stand for Dixie ; Uses of the past ; Biographical narratives ; Allen Tate and the novel as history ; The meditations of Robert Penn Warren

William Faulkner: Faulkner and agrarians ; Licensed chronicler ; Legend-makers (men) ; Legend-makers (women) ; The truths of fantasy. Conclusion: "Such was the war"

Supplement 1: The war prefigured

Supplement 2: Lincoln and the writers

Supplement 3: A further note on the "Collegians"

Supplement 4: Emily Dickinson's "Private campaign."