Bugles Blow No More

New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1957. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. [10], 493, [7] pages. Endpaper map. DJ has some wear, soiling, tears and chips. Some edge soiling. Clifford Dowdey (1904-1979) was an American author of fiction and nonfiction dealing with the American South, Virginia and especially the Civil War era. Clifford Dowdey was born in Richmond, Virginia January 23, 1904 and died there May 30, 1979. The Richmond Newspapers, the Richmond Times Dispatch and the Richmond News Leader eulogized him as The Last Confederate. Four of his grandmother's brothers were Confederate soldiers. He attended Columbia University from 1921-1925. About 1933 he started writing seriously on what eventually would become his first novel "Bugles Blow No More." He and his wife moved to Richmond, Virginia where he finished the novel and worked thereafter as a writer of historical works and published items in academic journals, such as "The Journal of Southern History". Several of his works were reviewed in "The New York Times." Derived from a Kirkus review: Let's take this hurdle -- it's another Civil War story. But let's hasten to add -- it is a new angle, a new setting, and it has a different motive. One has a sense of contemporary facets, a look into the lives and hearts of the families behind the lines in Richmond during the successive campaigns waged around the city. One sees the rest of the war only as it effects Richmond and the characters in the story. It almost reads like journalistic reporting of personal experiences. There is a social aspect generally ignored -- the ironing out of social lines, the involvement of emotions of people who ordinarily would not have met, the shifting of values. Not a story of war manoeuvres but of human passions. Worth reading.