Jack Hurst

Jack Hurst has written five books, four on the American Civil War era.

The most recent--America's Hardscrabble General: Ulysses S. Grant from Farm Boy to Shiloh--is an unconventional military biography that attempts to explain why Grant was so much more successful than the war's other high-ranking generals, Union or Confederate. Like virtually all of them, Grant was a West Pointer, so formal military education cannot be the answer. What was different about Grant was his more deprived background and harder life leading up to his greatest campaigns. The war's other ranking generals virtually all hailed from their societies' most comfortable, wealthy, and elite levels.

Hurst's other books are similarly compelling.

Men of Fire studies Grant and another prominent Civil War general, the fierce Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest, in the war's first notable Union conquests: Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee in 1862.

Born to Battle follows the fiery trails of Grant and Forrest through the war's middle years, before Grant was called east to face Robert E. Lee and Forrest descended into infamy at Fort Pillow.

Nathan Bedford Forrest: A Biography, which examines not just Forrest's imposing war record but also his life before and after the war, was described by the Washington Post as "a probing, lively account."

Hurst and his wife inhabit a small farm 60 miles east of Nashville.