Possible unpublished Civil War novel by a participant

1,313 Views | 8 Replies | Last: 7 yr ago by Phil Garner
aalan94
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AG
So in my research last year for my thesis, I came across deep in an archives the manuscript of what appeared to be an unpublished novel of the civil war.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.
FTACo88-FDT24dad
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AG
Very cool.

I feel silly even mentioning this because of your history bona fides and the certainty that you have read it, but Fighting for the Confederacy by Porter Alexander is damn good.
Jaydoug
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AG
Ooh, I'm very interested in what you discover. If you find it authentic and interesting, I might be interested in helping you publish.
aalan94
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AG
No, I have not read it, but it's a memoir, if I remember, correctly, and I'm really not finding anything out there in the way of fiction.

I wouldn't call myself an expert on the Civil War. I've got a better-than-average knowledge, but my history reading is a mile wide and a few inches deep, everything from fascism to ancient Greece to WWII, etc. Where I have gone very deep is Texas history, and even there, I stay prior to 1845 in most cases.

I'm still learning new stuff on the Civil War all the time. Like the fact that there was a confederate General who's no kidding name was States Rights Gist. As in, his first name was States and his middle was Rights. That's just bizarre and enlightening at the same time.
SRBS
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Gist was killed at Franklin
BQ78
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AG
aalan:

I am not aware of any Confederate veteran novels/short stories about the war (except maybe Twain and a Private Campaign) but I have read some from the Union side. In most cases they are memoirs that skwer still living persons so they called it a "novel" to keep from being charged with libel. In some cases they changed the names of the person but called the person "The Commander of the Third Corps at Gettysburg." Well everyone knew that was Dan Sickles. I acutally wrote a review of one a few years ago that was being published for the first time that was like that that went after Andrew A. Humphreys, it was interesting and for the most part factual with the events.
TheSheik
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AG
If you get to the point of talking to publishers, call Don Frazier at McMurry in Abilene
He also runs the McWhiney foundation that owns the State House Press
they have a great list of books in their portfolio

http://www.mcm.edu/~frazierd/

http://mcwhiney.org/state-house-press/


http://tamupress.com/Catalog/ProductSearch.aspx?filter=titles&search=&cid=0&sort=Name&itemsperpage=10&view=List¤tpage=&pf=pb=State%20House%20Press&sf=&sj=
aalan94
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AG
First plan is to go back to the archives when I get a chance and photo the rest of the book and read it myself and see how good it is. If it's good enough, I'll seek to publish it. If not, I'll consider writing a scholarly article about it with any relevant historical or literary comments. It may, however, really suck. I'm not sure yet. Old fiction gets very dated. Even "great" stories like the Leatherstocking tales are painful to read at times for a modern reader.

This could still go either way. It has some conventions and writing styles of the time period in the amount I've read, but nothing that looks just really awful in the way that really bad, pedantic writing sometimes does. But that's off a very limited survey of the text.
FTACo88-FDT24dad
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AG
aalan94 said:

No, I have not read it, but it's a memoir, if I remember, correctly, and I'm really not finding anything out there in the way of fiction.

I wouldn't call myself an expert on the Civil War. I've got a better-than-average knowledge, but my history reading is a mile wide and a few inches deep, everything from fascism to ancient Greece to WWII, etc. Where I have gone very deep is Texas history, and even there, I stay prior to 1845 in most cases.

I'm still learning new stuff on the Civil War all the time. Like the fact that there was a confederate General who's no kidding name was States Rights Gist. As in, his first name was States and his middle was Rights. That's just bizarre and enlightening at the same time.
Sorry, I missed the historic fiction angle. You are right about Fighting for the Confederacy. I loved reading it because it is written by a key player in the ANV.
Phil Garner
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Rebel Private: Front and Rear

Texas soldier. Fantastic read.
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