Charting the ironies of freedom won and lost during and after the Civil War, the American historian has also helped us better understand the ambiguous consequences of what were almost always only partial victories.
In his short story collection Exhalation, he builds social worlds where every character and object is deeply intertwined in history and in future possibility.
In A Good American Family, the journalist and editor examines his father and mother’s youthful idealism and the bitter years of McCarthyism that followed.
