Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cA feast for Civil War buffs \u2026 One of the best firsthand records of the Confederate experience \u2026 Electrifying.\u201d\u2014Walter Clemons,\u00a0<\/b>Newsweek<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cA great epic drama of our greatest national tragedy.\u201d\u2014William Styron,\u00a0<\/b>New York Review of Books<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck \u201calways to stumble in on the real show.\u201d Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South\u2019s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime\u2019s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her. In her own circles, the aristocratic, patriarchal, slave-holding Mary Chesnut was a figure of heresy and of paradox: she had a horror of slavery and called herself an abolitionist from early youth.<\/p>\n
Edited by the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward,\u00a0Mary Chesnut\u2019s Civil War\u00a0<\/i>presents a full and reliable edition of Chesnut\u2019s journals, restoring her to her rightful place in American history and literature.<\/p>\n