I have a reference work called “World Authors 1900-1950”. Each week I am going to spotlight one author from this work. Serendipity is working well so far. I opened volume one and selected the first author I saw.
Author: Bruce Catton
Bruce was one of the four founders of “American Heritage” magazine and was a notable civil war historian.
Bruce Catton (October 9, 1899 — August 28, 1978) was a journalist and a notable historian of the American Civil War. He won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.
Catton was known as a narrative historian who specialized in popular histories that emphasized the colorful characters and vignettes of history, in addition to the simple dates, facts, and analyses. His works, although well-researched, were generally not presented in a rigorous academic style, supported by footnotes. In the long line of Civil War historians, Catton is arguably the most prolific and popular of all, with Shelby Foote his only conceivable rival. Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of American Heritage magazine, wrote: “There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.”
The War Lords of Washington
His first book “The War Lords of Washington” was not about the civil war but about the military industrial complex during WWII.
Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood
Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood
One of America’s great Civil War historians recounts his days growing up in Benzonia, a small town in Michigan’s lower peninsula. During the first years of the 20th century (Catton was born in 1899), Catton listened to the tales of old Civil War veterans and gained an interest in the War Between the States that would never leave him. But this book, unlike Catton’s other works, isn’t primarily about the Civil War. It’s about growing up in a particular time and a place. Written with grace, warmth, and wit, it describes an era of trains and timber. People who know and love the forests of northern Michigan will appreciate this book immensely, as will anybody who has enjoyed Catton’s other books and wants to learn a little bit more about the historian who is one of America’s great storytellers.
One reviewer on Amazon commented: Though unabashedly nostalgic, “Waiting for the Morning Train” is neither saccharine nor bitter. Catton was far too experienced a writer and historian to let his emotions get the better of him. This is, nonetheless, a rich and moving memoir of a time which, though it may seem virtually within reach, we will never see again.
I recommend this book highly as a gift for yourself and, perhaps, for that reflective friend who can appreciate personal history told with universal appeal. Bruce Catton was, quite simply, one of the greatest writers and historians this country has produced, and in many ways this deceptively modest little volume represents the zenith of his literary achievement.
Bruce Catton Civil War books.
Grant Takes Command
Grant Moves South: 1861 – 1863
A Stillness at Appomattox
John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary (Life Inside the Civil War’s most infamous prison)
This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War
Bruce Catton on Emancipation
Preeminent historian, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Bruce Catton wrote the following article on the 100th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
http://www.nps.gov/anti/historyculture/catton.htm