num_pages: 11
description: As the Civil War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death, destruction, looting, thievery and chaos. In The March, E.L. Doctorow has put his unique stamp on these events by staying close to historical fact, naming real people and places and then imagining the rest, as he did in Ragtime.  Recently, the Civil War has been the subject of novels by Howard Bahr, Michael Shaara, Charles Frazier, and Robert Hicks, to name a few. Its perennial appeal is due not only to the fact that it was fought on our own soil, but also that it captures perfectly our long-time and ongoing ambivalence about race. Doctorow examines this question extensively, chronicling the dislocation of both southern whites and Negroes as Sherman burned and destroyed all that they had ever known. Sherman is a well-drawn character, pictured as a crazy tactical genius pitted against his West Point counterparts. Doctorow creates a context for the march: "The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize... There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves?"  The characters depicted on the march are those people high and low, white and black, whose lives are forever changed by war: Pearl, the newly free daughter of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, Colonel Sartorius, a competent, remote, almost robotic surgeon; several officers, both Union and Confederate; two soldiers, Arly and Will, who provide comic relief in the manner of Shakespeare's fools until, suddenly, their roles are not funny anymore.  Doctorow has captured the madness of war in his description of the condition of a dispossessed Southern white woman: "What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson's mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable." And later, " This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle."  As we have come to expect, Doctorow puts the reader in the picture; never more so than in recalling "The March" and letting us see it as a cautionary tale for our times. --Valerie Ryan
language: English
title: The March
titlecomplete: The March
characters: General Sherman
genres: Civil War, American, Historical, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, American History, American Civil War, War, Fiction
ratings_count: 13544
places: The United States of America
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Pulitzer Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War Fiction, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Premio Internacional de Novela Histórica Ciudad de Zaragoza
publisher: Random House Audio