Best robert e lee biography

When I was 12 I found a mass market paperback of Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, and it yanked me so deep into the world of the Civil War that I never got out—or ever wanted to.

In this I was far from alone. David Blight, author of several prize- winning books on the Civil War, discovered Catton at about the same age. “I used to pray for rain on my summer jobs so that I could read Stillness, Hallowed Ground, or Terrible Swift Sword,” he remembered.

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“Catton’s unsurpassed storytelling about the Civil War had much to do with my choice to become a historian.”[1] Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough bought a copy of A Stillness at Appomattox as a college senior “and looking back,” he wrote, “I think it changed my life.

I didn’t know that then, naturally. All I knew was that I had found in that book a kind of splendor I had not experienced before, and it started me on a new path.”[2]