JOHN MATTESON
speaks about his new book:
"A Worse Place than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation"
A copy of the materials displayed during
his presentation is available HERE or visit
presentation to the
Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia
Via Zoom
About the Topic:
December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln’s government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country’s law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American.
Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain
Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery.
Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and
Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father’s admiration, tended soldiers’ wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism,
John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause.
A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. John Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.
John Matteson is a native of San Mateo, California, who came to the East for college and, for the most part, stayed.
He has a history degree from Princeton, a law degree from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in English from Columbia. In between Harvard and Columbia, Mr. Matteson worked as a litigator in San Francisco, CA and Raleigh, NC, but he admits that he never really knew who he was until he put his law books in storage and decided to devote his life (or a fair amount of it) to reading good books and talking and writing about them.
"It's worked out pretty well," he reports. Mr. Matteson is now a distinguished professor of English at John Jay College in the City University of New York, teaching in the college's Honors Program. He wrote his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, with inspirations supplied by his daughter, Rebecca, who he says resembles Louisa May Alcott in fascinating ways. Mr. Matteson also admits that Eden's Outcasts surprised him and others by winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He was just as delighted with the response to his second book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography, which came out in 2012, and his annotated edition of Little Women, published in November 2015.
Mr. Matteson is looking forward to the response to his most recent work, A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, which was published in February 2021.
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