Photo credit: Nancy Crampton

A powerful exploration of Sherman’s “March to the Sea” during the American Civil War, told through the lives and sensibilities of the men and women who took part.

E.L. Doctorow’s books include City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate and The Waterworks. He has previously been a Finalist for the National Book Award four times and and won in 1986 for World’s Fair. Among his other honors are two National Book Critics Circle awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Humanities Medal.

Judges’ Citation

With taut, incendiary prose, E.L. Doctorow sweeps us up into the sixty-thousand troop force that was General Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Epic in scope, unsparing yet tender, The March captures the brutal truth that war is fought and suffered by individual men, women, and children. This is an important American novel which lays bare not only Sherman’s momentous trek through the south, but the trek into our own dusty and blood-filled past, the smoke of gun barrels and burned homes rising through the trees where the hope for peace and redemption endures.