The Death of a Confederate Colonel: Civil War Stories and a Novella

by Pat Carr

Dramatically compelling and historically informed, The Death of a Confederate Colonel takes us into the lives of those left behind during the Civil War. These stories, all with Arkansas settings, are filled with the trauma of the time. They tell of a Confederate woman’s care of and growing affection for a wounded Union soldier, a plantation mistress’s singular love for a sick slave child, and an eight-year-old girl’s fight for survival against frigid cold, injury, starvation, heartbreak, and lawlessness. Here are women holding down the home front with heroism and loyalty, or, sometimes, with weakness and duplicity. Will a young belle remain loyal to her wounded fiance? How long can a caring nurse hold her finger on a severed artery? And how does anyone comprehend the legacy of slavery and the brutality of war? The Death of a Confederate Colonel triumphs in its portrayal of desperate circumstances coated in the patina of the Civil War era, the complexity of ordinary people confronting situations that change them forever.

176 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

PAT CARR has a B.A. and M.A. from Rice, a Ph.D. from Tulane, and sixteen published books, including the Iowa Fiction Prize winner, The Women in the Mirror, and the PEN Book Award finalist, If We Must Die. She’s published over a hundred short stories in such places as The Southern Review, Yale Review, and Best American Short Stories. Her latest short story collection, The Death of a Confederate Colonel, a nominee for the Faulkner Award, won the PEN Southwest Fiction Award, the John Estes Cooke Civil War Fiction Award, and was voted one of the top ten books from university presses for 2007 by Foreword Magazine. She’s won numerous other awards, including a Library of Congress Marc IV, an NEH, the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award, an Al Smith Literary Fellowship, and a Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt Writing Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland. She’s taught creative writing and literature in numerous universities across the South, has conducted writing workshops from Santa Fe to New York, and in August, 2011, taught the Civil War novel at New York’s Chautauqua Institute. Her writing text, Writing Fiction with Pat Carr appeared from High Hill Press in 2010, and her memoir, One Page at a Time: On a Writing Life, also published in 2010 by Texas Tech University Press, was a finalist for both the Willa Cather Award and the PEN Southwest Non-fiction Award. Her novella, The Radiance of Fossils, is scheduled to appear from the Main Street Rag Press in the summer of 2012. She lives and writes on a thirty-six acre farm in Arkansas with her writer husband, Duane Carr, three dogs, a cat, and fifteen black chickens.

Reviews

[Jo Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are so many wonderful books and history-channel programs this year about the Civil War, that it's rather overwhelming to decide what to read/watch, and what to skip. I'm glad I chose to read these short stories about Arkansas during the War. While history does not focus on Arkansas a great deal during the Civil War, our state was forever changed by its devastation. These stories take place primarily in the area in which I live, northwest Arkansas, and they afforded me a glimpse of how women, in particular, dealt with the challenges of the Civil War.