The war memoir has always been a genre in American literature. The Revolutionary War had no sooner ended than some of its key figures wrote and published accounts of their experiences. Yet these, like most of the war memoirs published after the Civil War, were written by senior officers less concerned to document the war experience than to tell the stories of battles or campaigns and justify their own conduct in them. Although common soldiers, nurses, civilians, and others outside headquarters wrote letters and kept diaries—a tradition that dated back to the Revolutionary War and continued in the Civil War—few of their records were published until the twentieth century.

The Spanish-American War

The most influential memoir of the Spanish-American War (1898–1899) is Theodore Roosevelt's The Rough Riders (1899). There are only a few others, among them George Kennan's Campaigning in Cuba (1899); John Bigelow's Reminiscences of the...