Patriotic Gore
Patriotic Gore, collection of essays by Edmund Wilson, published in 1962. Subtitled Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, the book contains 16 essays on contemporaries’ attitudes toward the Civil War, the effect it had on their lives, and the effects of the postwar Reconstruction period.
Although the work focuses particularly on the South, it examines written documentary and literary material from both sides of the conflict. Among the subjects of the essays are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.; diaries of Southern women from various social strata; fiction such as Poganuc People by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Old Creole Days by George Washington Cable; and memoirs by Union commanders Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman and their Confederate counterparts, Robert E. Lee and John S. Mosby.