Literature

Literature

The Civil War, and the ideological passions that led to armed hostility, dominate American war literature of the nineteenth century. Yet for all the drama of this great national conflict, the major writers of the nineteenth-century American literary establishment tended to avoid direct treatment of the Civil War and the divisive issues such as race and slavery that produced it. The most well-known writer to address the war was the poet Walt Whitman, most famously in Drum-Taps, a volume of poems published in 1865. The novelist Herman Melville also published poems and commentary on the war in Battle Pieces in 1866. However, in great measure it was the amateurs and other writers on the margins of literary acceptance, including women and blacks, who struggled to comprehend their national upheaval through writing. In fact, the literature of the Civil War was emancipating for these two groups. Many women writers, most famously Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott, used the metaphor of a "civil war" to characterize class, race, and gender tensions within American life.

Much of the writing of the Civil War appeared in publications designed for popular consumption, such as weeklies and news magazines. These periodicals featured fiction, sensational novels and romances, and children's adventure tales, poems, songs, and histories.

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