"Mary Chesnut’s Civil War" — Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History

Updated on October 1, 2026: This has been sold.

Winner of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Reviews:

"The best of all Civil War memoirs, and one of the most remarkable eyewitness accounts to emerge from that or any other war."- Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The New Republic

"A great epic drama of our greatest national tragedy.... Provides a sense of the rhythms of ordinary life during those chaotic four years in a way that no other book has done." - William Styron, The New York Review of Books

"A painfully brilliant record of our old America at daggers drawn....C. Vann Woodward's editing ... is exemplary. ... He has reacquainted us with a remarkable woman; and she has reacquainted us with the living past."- Andrew Klavan, Saturday Review

"Here is a book to curl up with over a whole lifetime — to read and reread, to ponder and savor."—Selma R. Williams, The Boston Globe

"As an intimate view of actors and actions of great consequence and as a human picture — tender, outraged, comic — of a great war, there is nothing quite like this book."- Robert Penn Warren

Published in New Haven by Yale University Press. 886 pp

From the publisher:

"The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck "always to stumble in on the real show." Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South's headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime's death throes, its moment of high drama in world history.

"In her own circles aristocratic, patriarchal, slave-holding-Mary Chesnut was a figure of heresy and of paradox. She had a horror of slavery and called herself an abolitionist from early youth. Against male domination she expressed her rebellion in some of the most vehement feminist writing of her time: "There is no slave after all like a wife," she declared. A passionate participant in events, she was also a detached observer of all the strata of her society. The cast of characters that her journals endowed with such vigorous life and reality includes slaves and brown half-brothers, poor whites and sandhillers, common soldiers and solid yeomen, as well as the elite of government, army, and society who thronged her drawing room daily.

"In Mary Chesnut's Civil War, C. Vann Woodward provides the first full and reliable edition of the journals, making use of surviving parts of four manuscript versions. He restores significant passages from the original diary of the 1860s, which was written in the heat of the moment and revealed much that the author suppressed in the version intended for publication.

"Greatly gifted in intellect, charm, and independence of mind, Mary Chesnut was also a born writer. In this edition, her journals can finally claim their place in American literature as well as American history."

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