So in my research last year for my thesis, I came across deep in an archives the manuscript of what appeared to be an unpublished novel of the civil war. It wasn't relative to my topic, so I snapped a few pictures and moved on. Now I'm looking at this more closely.
I came back to this because I was reading recently that there are very, very few novels or fictional literature from actual civil war participants or contemporaries. Most of the literary outputs were diaries and other non-fiction stuff or some of Walt Whitman's poems. And there is basically zero, so far as I can tell, from the Southern perspective, which I suspect this to be. BQ78 might know otherwise.
I did not go through it all, but there are probably 200 pages or so in the archives. I plan to go back at some point and try to ascertain if it's complete or nearly so. If it is, and it's anywhere near readable (the handwriting is actually very legible, I'm talking about the quality of the content) I'm thinking about trying to find a publisher who might be interested. I need to find out, among other things, if I can do that, since I guess technically it belongs to the archive. If so, I can probably make a deal with them whereby the editor (me) would get some of the profit and the archive would get the other. Then again, there is no one alive who has intellectual property ownership, and the archive does not own that any more than you or I.
I have the name of the novel, but no author. I suspect based on the papers that it's a relative of one of the guys I was researching. I won't reveal until I get further along the process on this. I have searched several places, including databases with millions of obscure literary titles, etc. and have found nothing that matches this. It would be awesome, if possible to publish it.
I came back to this because I was reading recently that there are very, very few novels or fictional literature from actual civil war participants or contemporaries. Most of the literary outputs were diaries and other non-fiction stuff or some of Walt Whitman's poems. And there is basically zero, so far as I can tell, from the Southern perspective, which I suspect this to be. BQ78 might know otherwise.
I did not go through it all, but there are probably 200 pages or so in the archives. I plan to go back at some point and try to ascertain if it's complete or nearly so. If it is, and it's anywhere near readable (the handwriting is actually very legible, I'm talking about the quality of the content) I'm thinking about trying to find a publisher who might be interested. I need to find out, among other things, if I can do that, since I guess technically it belongs to the archive. If so, I can probably make a deal with them whereby the editor (me) would get some of the profit and the archive would get the other. Then again, there is no one alive who has intellectual property ownership, and the archive does not own that any more than you or I.
I have the name of the novel, but no author. I suspect based on the papers that it's a relative of one of the guys I was researching. I won't reveal until I get further along the process on this. I have searched several places, including databases with millions of obscure literary titles, etc. and have found nothing that matches this. It would be awesome, if possible to publish it.