Overview

In December 1862, the Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and threatened to break apart Abraham Lincoln's government. Five extraordinary individuals experienced Fredericksburg's cataclysmic repercussions?Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, John Pelham, and Arthur Fuller. Guided by duty, driven by desire, they moved toward lofty destinies: a young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by guardians of propriety, a struggling writer desperate to serve the cause and gain her philosopher father's admiration, a West Point cadet from Alabama excelling in artillery tactics, and a one-eyed minister seeking to prove his manhood. Because of what they saw and suffered, America, too, would never be the same. In A Worse Place Than Hell, John Matteson creates a gripping tale of the Civil War and profound cultural transformation. He etches an exquisite portrait, revealing through these lives how America was redefined by its most tragic conflict.

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Reviews

If the truest history is biography, as Emerson says, then seldom has history been better told than in this epic biography of five lives upended and transformed by the Civil War. John Matteson helps us see through the surface to the deeper currents beneath, revealing how one key battle became the inflection point transforming not only these men and women but the nation they composed, right down to the stories we tell, the poems we read, the monuments we build, the laws we live by, the prayers we utter-even the buildings we live in. Not to be missed. -- Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life Fredericksburg in 1862 became a true touchstone of history...John Matteson's genius flows effortlessly through the entire narrative, taking us through the blast furnace of war and its battles and hospitals, and its suffering. This is the best book I've ever read on the impact and meaning of Fredericksburg, where ordinary lives were made extraordinary. -- Francis A. O'Reilly, author of The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock If you already know who won the Battle of Fredericksburg, you will soon forget, as John Matteson follows the intimate and intricate lives of five people who lived through it. Courage and valor vie with fear and anxiety-on a wintertime battlefield, on the home front, and in field hospitals. This story of choices, mistakes, and shifting luck is also a portrait of war on a human scale. -- Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln

John Matteson has once again delivered a beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and brilliantly interpreted work of history. This is a riveting and eerily relevant account of America at its most divided, yet also seeking redemption.--Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography Matteson deftly unfurls many stories within stories with a confident, novelistic flair. Ambitious, nuanced, and thoroughly rewarding. Fredericksburg in 1862 became a true touchstone of history...John Matteson's genius flows effortlessly through the entire narrative, taking us through the blast furnace of war and its battles and hospitals, and its suffering. This is the best book I've ever read on the impact and meaning of Fredericksburg, where ordinary lives were made extraordinary.--Francis A. O'Reilly, author of The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock If the truest history is biography, as Emerson says, then seldom has history been better told than in this epic biography of five lives upended and transformed by the Civil War. John Matteson helps us see through the surface to the deeper currents beneath, revealing how one key battle became the inflection point transforming not only these men and women but the nation they composed, right down to the stories we tell, the poems we read, the monuments we build, the laws we live by, the prayers we utter--even the buildings we live in. Not to be missed.--Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life If you already know who won the Battle of Fredericksburg, you will soon forget, as John Matteson follows the intimate and intricate lives of five people who lived through it. Courage and valor vie with fear and anxiety--on a wintertime battlefield, on the home front, and in field hospitals. This story of choices, mistakes, and shifting luck is also a portrait of war on a human scale.--Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln

Author Information

John Matteson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Eden’s Outcasts and the Ann M. Sperber Prize for The Lives of Margaret Fuller. A Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, he lives in the Bronx.

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