About this ebook
Civil War Memories is a compilation of nineteen stories of the Civil War written in the late 1800s, giving them a ring of authenticity. The voices are both Northern and Southern, male and female, angry and melancholy, serious and comic; but they all treat the Civil War as a watershed in American history and in the lives of those who lived through it.
Authors include: Bret Harte, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, W. C. Morrow, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Albion W. Tourgée, George Cary Eggleston, Mark Twain, Henry James, Grace E. King, Harold Frederic, John William De Forest, Kate Chopin, Thomas Nelson Page, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edward Lucas White, Henry Timrod.
About the author
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was an American author best known for her novel Little Women. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, she was educated by her father, the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, as well as by family friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. She was a Union Army nurse in the Civil War and published sensationalist novels under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard before finding lasting success as a children’s author with Little Women and its three sequels.
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), who grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and worked as a printer, riverboat pilot, newspaperman, and silver miner before his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” brought him international attention. He would go on to write two of the great American novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and many other enduring works of fiction, satire, and travelogue. He is one of the most widely recognized figures in US history.
Ambrose Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature.”
Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American poet, novelist, and journalist. His best-known works, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, are widely regarded as two of the most innovative novels of the nineteenth century. After surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida—an experience he fictionalized in the short story “The Open Boat”—and reporting from battlefields in Cuba and Greece, Crane died in a German sanatorium at the age of twenty-eight.
