Civil War Memories: Nineteen Stories of Battle, Bravery, Love, and Tragedy

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was an American author best known for her novel Little Women. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, she was educated by her father, the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, as well as by family friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. She was a Union Army nurse in the Civil War and published sensationalist novels under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard before finding lasting success as a children’s author with Little Women and its three sequels.

Mark Twain, who was born Samuel L. Clemens in Missouri in 1835, wrote some of the most enduring works of literature in the English language, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was his last completed book&—and, by his own estimate, his best. Its acquisition by Harper && Brothers allowed Twain to stave off bankruptcy. He died in 1910.&

Ambrose Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. A prolific and versatile writer, Bierce was regarded as one of the most influential journalists in the United States, and as a pioneering writer of realist fiction. His story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has been described as “one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was an American poet, novelist, and journalist. His best-known works, The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, are widely regarded as two of the most innovative novels of the nineteenth century. After surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Florida—an experience he fictionalized in the short story “The Open Boat”—and reporting from battlefields in Cuba and Greece, Crane died in a German sanatorium at the age of twenty-eight.