The Modern Library Civil War Bookshelf

Stephen Crane was born in 1871, in Newark, New Jersey. In 1892 Crane moved to the poverty of New York City’s Lower East Side—the Bowery so vividly depicted in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In 1894 the serial publication began of The Red Badge of Courage, his acclaimed and widely popular novel of a young soldier’s coming of age in the Civil War. He died in Germany at the age of 28 in 1900.

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) was the president of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, served in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and was secretary of war under Franklin Pierce.

Ulysses Simpson Grant (1822–1885) was the commander-in-chief of Union forces during the final years of the Civil War and subsequently the 18th president of the United States.

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) was the 16th president of the United States and is regarded as one of America’s greatest heroes. He is best known for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which declared slaves free, and for preserving the Union during the Civil War. Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), born to a prominent New England family in Connecticut, was a prolific writer best remembered today for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. First serialized in 1851 in The National Era, an abolitionist paper, in 40 weekly installments, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an enormous success. Tolstoy deemed it a great work of literature "flowing from love of God and man," and within a year the book had sold more than 300,000 copies.