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Drawing on his own combat experience in the Union forces, John W. De Forest crafted a war novel like nothing before it in the annals of American literature. As a captain in the 12th Connecticut Regimental Volunteers, De Forest joined in the battles of Georgia Landing and Bisland and in the siege of Port Hudson in Louisana in 1862-63, and he saw action in Sheridan's Shenadoah Valley campaign in 1864. His firsthand knowledge of 'the wilderness of death' made its way onto the pages of his riveting novel with devastating effect. Whether depicting the tedium before combat, the unspoken horror of battle, or the grisly butchery of the field hopital, De Forest broke new ground, anticipating the realistic war writings of Hemingway, Mailer, and Tim O'Brien. A commercial failure in its own day, De Forest's story was praised by Henry James and William Dean Howells, who, comparing it favorably to War and Peace, acclaimed the book 'one of the best American novels ever written.' As Gary Scharnhorst writes in his introduction to this new edition, 'In the whole reach of American fiction there is no novel more deserving, on both aesthetic and historical grounds, to be resurrected from the footnote than Miss Ravenel's Conversion.'
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