Patriotic Gore
Published in 1962, Patriotic Gore is Edmund Wilson's long study of the writing produced by Americans on both sides of the Civil War. Rather than retelling the military history, Wilson reads the war through its participants on the page, from Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman to Mary Chesnut, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and the lesser known diarists and journalists who recorded the conflict. The book is famous for its provocative introduction, in which Wilson argues that wars are typically waged for power rather than principle, a view many critics found unpersuasive given the moral stakes of slavery. The chapters themselves are admiring close readings of the period's prose, attentive to style and to how each writer made sense of catastrophe. Patriotic Gore remains a major work of American literary criticism.
What you might want to know about Patriotic Gore
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Edmund Wilson's sweeping study of the literature produced before, during, and after the American Civil War.
Not really; it is a literary study of the writers shaped by the war rather than a military or political narrative.
Wilson argues wars are driven by power more than principle, a view many historians have disputed in the case of the Civil War.
Patriotic Gore was written by Edmund Wilson, published in 1962 by W. W. Norton & Company.
Patriotic Gore is 816 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Patriotic Gore takes most readers 12 to 18 hours to finish.
Patriotic Gore is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
