Undoubtedly Bruce Catton’s most brilliant book, A Stillness at Appomattox won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for excellence in nonfiction. Catton, our foremost Civil War historian, recounts the most spectacular conflicts between Grant and Lee and details the end of hope for the Confederacy.
Utilizing various collections of unpublished letters written by soldiers, personal diaries of spouses and relatives, memoirs of soldiers and their families, and official war records, Catton follows Grant’s campaigns from early 1864 to the end of the war, detailing many crucial battles along the way.

Infinitely absorbing, Bruce Catton’s The Civil War is one of the most widely read general histories of the war available in a single volume.

“America needed its great war of brothers,” wrote Bruce Catton, “to weld in a terrible fire what had been and what might be. The story of the war needs retelling because it helped to change the future of the human race.”

The Civil War is America’s great Iliad, and few would dispute that its outcome is evident in most social and political issues today. For a person seeking a single volume to serve as a captivating introduction and a dependable guide through all the maze of battles and issues of the Civil War, this is a book without parallel. Catton understood the Civil War, its participants and battles, and he unfolds it with skill and simplicity, from the early division of the North and South to the final surrender of the Confederate troops. Of all historians past and present, Bruce Catton ranks among the best.

The New York Times hails this trilogy as “one of the greatest historical accomplishments of our time.” With stunning detail and insights, America’s foremost Civil War historian recreates the war from its opening months to its final, bloody end. Each volume delivers a complete listening experience. The Coming Fury (Vol. 1): From the split Democratic Convention in the spring of 1860 to the first battle of Bull Run.

The classic one-volume history of the American Civil War by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton.

Covering events from the prelude of the conflict to the death of Lincoln, Catton blends a gripping narrative with deep, yet unassuming, scholarship to bring the war alive in an almost novelistic way. It is this gift for narrative that led contemporary critics to compare this book to War and Peace, and call it a “modern Iliad.” Now over fifty years old, This Hallowed Ground remains one of the best-loved and admired general Civil War books: a perfect introduction to listeners beginning their exploration of the conflict, as well as a thrilling analysis and reimagining of its events for experienced students of the war.