in any of half a hundred volumes on the Civil War. I pick this only
because it is handy. From W. E. Woodward’s _Years of Madness_, p. 202:
“ ... Union troops that night and next morning took a position on
Cemetery Hill and Round Top.... The Confederates could have occupied
this position but they failed to do so. It was an error with momentous
consequences.”
About Ward Moore
On the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a small hill
called Little Round Top. One morning in July, 1863, the Confederate
Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a
mistake that cost them victory in a battle which—in the view of many
historians—was the turning point of the Civil War. In the ninety years
since Gettysburg one question has never been far from the minds of
most Southerners—and a good many Yankees, too: What if the battle had
gone the other way, what if the South had won the war? Ward Moore—a
Northerner himself—has settled the matter at last in a book that might
be called imaginative historical fiction, an excursion into the world
of might-have-been so filled with exact and convincing detail that, for
a few hours, it seems true.
* * * * *
The author of _Bring the Jubilee_ was born in Madison, New Jersey, in
1903. “From the age of five,” he writes, “books have been for me the
essential narcotic; as a natural consequence I detested school. When
this detestation did not bring on psychosomatic illnesses to save me
from the hated classrooms, I was not above malingering or playing
hooky—now a lost art, but one practiced in my generation. Three weeks
short of graduation I quit high school and have not been inside a
school house since, except to vote.
* * * * *
“My first short story was written at the age of eleven and was followed
by a flood of juvenilia, some little of which was unfortunately
published. Happily, markets and industry died simultaneously; I wrote
only desultorily until my first novel _Breathe the Air Again_ was
published in 1942. This was acclaimed by Max Eastman in the American
Mercury, who predicted that I would fall heir to ‘the cloak of Upton
Sinclair.’ Something went wrong with the tailoring arrangements; my
next novel was _Greener Than You Think_ (Sloane, 1947), a satirical
fantasy.”
* * * * *
In addition to these two novels, Mr. Moore has published a number of
short stories in such disparate media as Amazing Stories and Harper’s
Bazaar, Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Reporter, Science Fiction
Quarterly and Tomorrow.
* * * * *
He concludes: “I have been intensely interested in the history of the
Civil War ever since—at the age of six—I came across a book with nice
black woodcuts showing the firing on Fort Sumter and the burning of
Richmond. As an amateur I’ve read hundreds of dull volumes and a score
of fascinating ones on the Irrepressible Conflict. A novel based on the
concept ‘what would have happened if the South had won at Gettysburg,’
was practically inevitable. _Bring the Jubilee_ is it.”
_The Idea Behind_
DUAL EDITIONS
An agreement unusual in American publishing has been made between
FARRAR, STRAUS and YOUNG, INC., and BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC. We believe
that through simultaneous publication of new titles in paperbound and
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a lower price for the trade editions, while nation-wide distribution
of the paperbound edition makes immediately available to a great new
audience the best in current fiction and non-fiction.
* * * * *
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