Title: Requiem for a lost city
First published: 1999
Description: Requiem for a Lost City shows us the reality of Civil War Atlanta from the eve of secession to the memorials for the fallen, through the memories of a participant. Sallie Clayton would have been the same age as the fictional Scarlett O'Hara during the Civil War. Sallie Clayton's memoirs, however, are not a work of fiction but bittersweet reminiscences of growing up in a doomed city in the midst of losing a war.

Although her memoirs provide invaluable detail on Civil War Atlanta, they also tell of her personal experiences on a plantation in Montgomery, Alabama, and in postwar Augusta and Athens.

Sallie Clayton belonged to one of Georgia's wealthiest and most prominent families. Her memoirs are colored by the losses suffered by her family. Robert Davis's introduction to this work illustrates the background of the Claytons, Sallie's writings, and Civil War Atlanta, providing a balanced account of life at "the crossroads of the Confederacy." The introduction also provides a corrective to the popular, Gone With the Wind view of Civil War Atlanta.
Subjects: Georgia Civil War, 1861-1865, Diaries, Social aspects, Women, United States Civil War, 1861-1865, Personal narratives, Personal narratives, Confederate, Confederate Personal narratives, Biography, History, Atlanta (ga.), history, United states, history, civil war, 1861-1865, biography, Georgia, biography
Places: Atlanta, Atlanta (Ga.), Georgia, United States
People: Sarah Conley Clayton (1845-1922)
Time periods: 19th century, Civil War, 1861-1865
LC classification: E605 .C595 1999