Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore - HTML preview

About Ward Moore

On the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there is a small hill called Little Round Top. One morning in July, 1863, the Confederate Army made the tactical error of not occupying this hill. It was a mistake that cost them victory in a battle which—in the view of many historians—was the turning point of the Civil War. In the ninety years since Gettysburg one question has never been far from the minds of most Southerners—and a good many Yankees, too: What if the battle had gone the other way, what if the South had won the war? Ward Moore—a Northerner himself—has settled the matter at last in a book that might be called imaginative historical fiction, an excursion into the world of might-have-been so filled with exact and convincing detail that, for a few hours, it seems true.

The author of Bring the Jubilee was born in Madison, New Jersey, in 1903. “From the age of five,” he writes, “books have been for me the essential narcotic; as a natural consequence I detested school. When this detestation did not bring on psychosomatic illnesses to save me from the hated classrooms, I was not above malingering or playing hooky—now a lost art, but one practiced in my generation. Three weeks short of graduation I quit high school and have not been inside a school house since, except to vote.

“My first short story was written at the age of eleven and was followed by a flood of juvenilia, some little of which was unfortunately published. Happily, markets and industry died simultaneously; I wrote only desultorily until my first novel Breathe the Air Again was published in 1942. This was acclaimed by Max Eastman in the American Mercury, who predicted that I would fall heir to ‘the cloak of Upton Sinclair.’ Something went wrong with the tailoring arrangements; my next novel was Greener Than You Think (Sloane, 1947), a satirical fantasy.”

In addition to these two novels, Mr. Moore has published a number of short stories in such disparate media as Amazing Stories and Harper’s Bazaar, Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Reporter, Science Fiction Quarterly and Tomorrow.

He concludes: “I have been intensely interested in the history of the Civil War ever since—at the age of six—I came across a book with nice black woodcuts showing the firing on Fort Sumter and the burning of Richmond. As an amateur I’ve read hundreds of dull volumes and a score of fascinating ones on the Irrepressible Conflict. A novel based on the concept ‘what would have happened if the South had won at Gettysburg,’ was practically inevitable. Bring the Jubilee is it.”