Edmund Wilson's monumental study examines the Civil War through the lives and writings of some thirty figures—soldiers, statesmen, activists, and writers whose work expressed the conflict's meanings. Wilson, one of the twentieth century's premier literary critics, reads the war's literature with the same care he brought to Proust or Joyce, treating Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln as writers whose achievements deserved serious analysis. The book interweaves biography, literary criticism, and historical argument, showing how individual lives both shaped and were shaped by the war. Wilson examines how the North's crusade for union and emancipation produced its own mythologies and self-deceptions, and how the South's lost cause generated literature and memory that would poison American politics for generations. His treatment of Lincoln's literary development—from conventional rhetoric to the compressed poetry of the Second Inaugural—provides a master class in close reading. Wilson wrote during the civil rights era, and his attention to how the war's unfinished business persisted carries contemporary urgency. The book's length allows for the kind of sustained engagement with primary texts that shorter studies cannot achieve; readers encounter substantial excerpts from diaries, speeches, and memoirs rather than paraphrases. This remains the essential literary history of the Civil War, demonstrating how imaginative writing and historical understanding illuminate each other.