Synopses & Reviews
Allan Gurganus's
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heoines in American literature.
Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
Synopsis
Lucy Mardsen is the widow of the Civil War's last surviving soldier. She is now half-blind, 99 years old, and very talkative.
For Lucy, the Civil War is the stuff of gritty, comic legend and her terms are the common foot soldier's -- ribald and blunt. Her story offers a gallery of characters: aristocrats and sharecroppers, blacks and whites, slaves and free men -- Lee and Lincoln among them. With her last energies she cracks jokes, names names and tells how it really was. Throughout it all the stakes were always high: the lives of her nine children, the freedom of her best friend and her own emancipation.
About the Author
Allan Gurganus's The Practical Heart (0-679-43763-0) will be published by Knopf in August 2001. He lives in North Carolina.