The March - by E L Doctorow (Paperback)

About the Book

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his 60,000 troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and compassionately render the lives of those who marched.

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD
WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

In 1864, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman marched his sixty thousand troops through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces, demolished cities, and accumulated a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the dispossessed and the triumphant. In E. L. Doctorow's hands the great march becomes a floating world, a nomadic consciousness, and an unforgettable reading experience with awesome relevance to our own times.

Review Quotes

"E. L. Doctorow [is] always astonishing. . . . In The March, he dreams himself backward from The Book of Daniel to Ragtime to The Waterworks to the Civil War, into the creation myth of the Republic itself, as if to assume the prophetic role of such nineteenth-century writers as Emerson, Melville, Whitman, and Poe."--Harper's

"An Iliad-like portrait of war as a primeval human affliction . . . [welds] the personal and the mythic into a thrilling and poignant story."--New York Times

"Splendid . . . carries us through a multitude of moments of wonder and pity, terror and comedy . . . with an elegiac compassion and prose of a glittering, swift-moving economy." --The New Yorker

"Spellbinding . . . a ferocious re-imagining of the past that returns it to us as something powerful and strange."--Time

About the Author

E. L. Doctorow's works of fiction include Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, City of God, The March, Homer & Langley, and Andrew's Brain. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer's lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/ Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose "scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature." In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction. In 2014 he was honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.