My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don't have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.

I've never shown anybody a draft of anything.

Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is.

A rich man's war and a poor man's fight.

I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.