The Coming Fury (American Civil War Trilogy, Vol. 1). This item is unavailable.The Coming Fury (American Civil War Trilogy, Vol. 1)

In this thrillingly readable piece of historical writing, Bruce Catton describes the forces which combined to drive the United States apart. Opening with the Democratic Party's Charleston Convention in 1860 and the split which ended with two Democratic candidates for the Presidency; the Republic Convention and the campaign which ended in Lincoln's victory, the book takes its inevitable course to the wave of secession in the South, the firing of the first shots at Fort Sumter, the aligning of forces in the North and South, ending with the first battle of the war at Bull Run. Catton superbly conveys the way the country first drifted, and then was swept, into war. We see Lincoln and Jefferson Davis pitted against each other and the famous generals, Robert E. Lee, fighting for the Confederacy and William T.Sherman lining up with the North.'...a major work by a major writer, a superb re-creation of the twelve crucial months that opened the Civil War' New York Times

Bruce Catton was born in 1899. As a child living in a small town in Michigan, Catton was stimulated by the reminiscences of the Civil War that he heard from local veterans. His education at Oberlin College, Ohio, was interrupted by two years of naval service in World War I and was subsequently abandoned for a career in journalism. While he was employed as a reporter for the Boston American, the Cleveland News, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer (1920-26), Catton continued his lifelong study of the Civil War period. He subsequently worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Service (1926-41) and for the U.S. War Production Board. In 1954 he became a member of the staff of American Heritage magazine, and from 1959 he served as its senior editor. A commission to write a Centennial History of the Civil War evolved into Catton's celebrated trilogy on the Army of the Potomac. Catton's brilliance as a historian lay in his ability to bring to historical narrative the immediacy of reportage. He died in 1978.