Howard Bahr "The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War."
Powerful and elegiac... Readers will be reminded of Stephen Crane, of Faulkner's Civil War stories, and of John Brown's Body. Howard Bahr compresses this moving Civil War novel into 48 hours--two short days filled with grim deaths and the prelude, at least, to a love story.
Confederate rifleman Bushrod Carter, the novel's protagonist, is wounded during the battle and taken to a nearby house. In this makeshift hospital, he and two childhood friends huddle together, "shivering with cold and exhaustion, ignoring the ghostly shapes still shuffling through the coiling smoke around them, calling the names of men who would never answer." Bahr has poured 20 years of research into his novel, but this haunting portrayal of suffering and death is the product not merely of historical diligence but also an impressive literary imagination.
Paperback. 1998.
New book. Book in excellent visual and technical condition.