I've Never Shown Anybody A Draft Of

The Point I Would Make Is That The Novelist And The Historian Are Seeking The Same Thing: The Truth – Not A Different Truth: The Same Truth – Only They Reach It, Or Try To Reach It, By Different Routes. Whether The Event Took Place In A World Now Gone To Dust, Preserved By Documents And Evaluated By Scholarship, Or In The Imagination, Preserved By Memory And Distilled By The Creative Process, They Both Want To Tell Us How It Was: To Re-create It, By Their Separate Methods, And Make It Live Again In The World Around Them.

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.

And I Really Do Think That The Difficulty Of Research Makes It More Real To You Than Punching A Thing To Find Out How Many Men Were Killed At This Particular Action.

I Took Five Years On The First Volume, Five Years On The Second Volume, And Ten Years On The Third Volume.

I've Never Known, At Least A Modern Historical Instance, Where The Truth Wasn't Superior To Distortion In Every Way.