To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861-1876 (review)

The introduction to this collection of Civil War stories from literary magazines of the 1860s and 70s discusses several important issues for scholars of nineteenth-century American periodicals. The mediacy and apparent immediacy of the periodical press, the problems of representation in magazine culture, and the reception of literary magazines all receive due attention from the editor, Kathleen Diffley. But in light of Diffley's emphasis on the particularities of magazine culture, including the context in which stories appeared and the illustrations that accompanied them, a reader might ask, why read this collection rather than locating Civil War stories oneself in their original sites of publication?

On the level of readerly interest, To Live and Die addresses this concern by presenting a highly readable text, including contemporary magazine illustrations. Diffley's arrangement of the stories in chronological sequence and her selection of a wide range of authors, events, and regional publications make the collection both a generous representative sample and an engaging multivocal narrative. From the opening story of pre-war Kansas originally published in San Francisco's Overland Monthly to Mark Twain's first Atlantic Monthly contribution, "A True Story," which concludes the collection, readers can find authors treating major battles, domestic disturbance, civil unrest, and social division with both partisan zeal and comparatively neutral humor. Diffley's introductions to each story provide the stitching for this "patchwork novel," as she calls it, by noting relevant historical backgrounds, citing scholarly references, and making often-unexpected transitions, some of which evoke the air of "daily emergency" that she finds in literary magazines of the period (7). As a result of the imposed chronology, though, readers may need to remind themselves that these "diverse and clamorous" voices (5) did first appear in disparate magazines over a period of almost fifteen years, some of them reporting on recent events, others looking back from a greater historical remove.

This caveat notwithstanding, Diffley's collection is, to my knowledge, the foremost in gathering and focusing exclusively on contemporary magazine literature on the Civil War. Other collections, such as Martin H. Greenberg and Bill Pronzini's A Treasury of Civil War Stories (1985), do include magazine fiction, but they often span from the late-nineteenth century well into the twentieth, and/or they favor canonical and better-known authors. Meanwhile, the scholarly apparatus for other collections—including George William Koon's Old Glory and the Stars and Bars (1995) and Eric Solomon's The Faded Banners (1960)—is limited to a brief general introduction and little else. To Live and Die, on the other hand, offers not only a well-documented introduction centered on magazine culture of the 1860s and 70s but also an appendix of biographical sketches on individual authors, as well as a glossary of Civil War terms and a bibliographic essay. These features provide a useful yet non-intrusive scholarly supplement to the stories themselves, making the book a handy reference, as well as a good read. For less experienced researchers, Diffley's mix of authors—from the well-known (Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis) to the notable, if lesser-known (Silas Weir Mitchell, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Frederic Beecher Perkins) to the obscure and the anonymous—provides an educational introduction. For those with more experience, the bibliographic essay offers a meaty paragraph of reference material for each story.

Although much of the scholarship Diffley cites has no explicit connection to periodical literature, her references generally encourage an interdisciplinary approach to magazine culture similar to that of her 1992 monograph Where My Heart Is Turning Ever. The introduction of To Live and Die overlaps that book to some extent by stressing again the contributions of women writers, the role of the domestic sphere, and...