If You Want To Study Writing, Read

Getting Close To Books, And Spending Time By Myself, I Was Obliged To Think About Things I Would Never Have Thought About If I Was Busy Romping Around With A Brother And Sister.

And I'm A Slow Writer: Five, Six Hundred Words Is A Good Day. That's The Reason It Took Me 20 Years To Write Those Million And A Half Words Of The Civil War.

The Civil War Defined Us As What We Are And It Opened Us To Being What We Became, Good And Bad Things... It Was The Crossroads Of Our Being, And It Was A Hell Of A Crossroads.

People Want To Know Why The South Is So Interested In The Civil War. I Had Maybe, It's A Rough Guess, About Fifty Fistfights In My Life. Out Of Those Fifty Fistfights, The Ones That I Had The Most Vivid Memory Of Were The Ones I Lost. I Think That's One Reason Why The South Remembers The War More Than The North Does.

My Second Book, Follow Me Down Had Some Success, Got Good Critical Notices, Went Into A Second Printing And Things Like That, But Shiloh Was By Far The Most Successful Of Those First Five Novels.