Word: shermans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Taken together, his 11 novels, which include Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, retell the past 150 years of American history. Doctorow's new work, The March, narrates General Sherman's Civil War campaign and just earned the author his second PEN/Faulkner prize for fiction. Doctorow spoke to TIME's Lev Grossman about his novel, his generation and his country's newest...
...NATIONAL TRAUMA. Well, the fracture in our society widened. It's still there--that crack still goes down the middle of it. You could call the war a trauma. It was, of course. But it had an epic quality to it. It was more than a trauma, really. Sherman's march was not only a devastating military campaign, it was like a great scythe that cut down and uprooted an entire culture. By creating thousands of refugees, black and white, who attached themselves to the march, it became another reality, another state of being. A floating world. Everything was reversed...
...HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO THE REAL PEOPLE IN YOUR BOOK, LIKE GENERAL SHERMAN. Oh, it's a very serious responsibility, and I take it very seriously. Sherman fascinated me. I had read his memoir. He was a brilliant writer--he was almost as good as Grant. They were the best writing generals we've ever had. And I tried to do justice to that and to acknowledge the conflicts within him. He thought the Confederacy was an act of treason and had to be dealt with, and the way you fight a war is without limit...
...HAVE ACCUSED PRESIDENT BUSH OF "MORAL VACANCY." WOULD YOU CONTRAST HIM WITH A GUY LIKE SHERMAN? There's a passage in the book about the inability to understand death, when Sherman is giving a kind of a soliloquy. His troops have taken a fort just before entering Savannah, and they lie down to sleep beside the dead bodies of the Confederates who were defending the fort. He's drinking a cup of wine, smoking a cigar and thinking about the difference between sleep and death, and how hard it is to understand death. Some people make the effort to understand...
MATTHEW A. DUDA ’78 Sherman Oaks, Calif. February...