John Matteson received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father and the Ann M. Sperber Prize for The Lives of Margaret Fuller. A Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the editor of The Annotated Little Women, he resides in the Bronx.
John Matteson has once again delivered a beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and brilliantly interpreted work of history. This is a riveting and eerily relevant account of America at its most divided, yet also seeking redemption.--Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography Matteson deftly unfurls many stories within stories with a confident, novelistic flair. Ambitious, nuanced, and thoroughly rewarding. Fredericksburg in 1862 became a true touchstone of history...John Matteson's genius flows effortlessly through the entire narrative, taking us through the blast furnace of war and its battles and hospitals, and its suffering. This is the best book I've ever read on the impact and meaning of Fredericksburg, where ordinary lives were made extraordinary.--Francis A. O'Reilly, author of The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock If the truest history is biography, as Emerson says, then seldom has history been better told than in this epic biography of five lives upended and transformed by the Civil War. John Matteson helps us see through the surface to the deeper currents beneath, revealing how one key battle became the inflection point transforming not only these men and women but the nation they composed, right down to the stories we tell, the poems we read, the monuments we build, the laws we live by, the prayers we utter--even the buildings we live in. Not to be missed.--Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life If you already know who won the Battle of Fredericksburg, you will soon forget, as John Matteson follows the intimate and intricate lives of five people who lived through it. Courage and valor vie with fear and anxiety--on a wintertime battlefield, on the home front, and in field hospitals. This story of choices, mistakes, and shifting luck is also a portrait of war on a human scale.--Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln