'The Real War Will Never Get in the Books'

Drawing on a wide range of material, including diaries, letters, and essays, Masur captures the reactions, as the war was waged, of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, and Louisa May Alcott.