Stephen B. Oates

The Whirlwind of War is the second book in Stephen B. Oates's Voices of the Storm trilogy, which began with The Approaching Fury. The Whirlwind of War builds on the great themes and follows many of the important figures that were introduced in The Approaching Fury. Oates brings his moving narrative of the complex, bloody, and destructive war to life by writing in the first person, impersonating the voices and assuming the viewpoints of several of the principal figures: the rival presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; the rival generals, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman; the great black abolitionist, editor, and orator, Frederick Douglass; the young Union battlefield nurse, Cornelia Hancock; the brilliant head of the Chicago Sanitary Commission and cocreator of the northern Sanitary Fair, Mary Livermore; the Confederate socialite and political insider, Mary Boykin Chesnut; the assassin, John Wilkes Booth; and the greatest poet of the era, Walt Whitman, who speaks in the coda about the meaning of war and Lincoln's death.

In the Approaching Fury: Voices of the Storm 1820-1861, biographer and historian Stephen B. Oates tells the story of the coming of the American Civil War through the voices and from the viewpoints of thirteen principal players in the drama, from Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay in the Missouri crisis of 1820 down to Stephen A. Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and Abraham Lincoln in the final crisis of 1861. This unique approach shows the crucial role that perception of events played in the sectional hostilities that bore the United States irreversibly toward a national smashup. In addition to Jefferson, Clay, Douglas, Davis and Lincoln, other speakers and participants are Nat Turner, William Lloyd Garrison, John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Fitzhugh, John Brown, and Mary Boykin Chesnut. Each character takes his or her turn onstage, serving as narrator for critical events in which he or she was the major instigator and participant or eyewitness. In writing the dramatic monologues, Oates drew on the actual words of his speaker - their letter, speeches, interviews, recollection, and other recorded utterances - and then simulated how, if they were reminiscing aloud, they would describe the crucial events in which they were the principal actors or witnesses. All the events and themes in the monologues adhere to the actual historical record.

Portrays America's most famous slave rebel and the insurrection he led in southeastern Virginia's Southampton County in August, 1831.

The first major biography of King, based on extensive research in manuscript collections, traces King's personal development as well as the development of his ideas on protest and nonviolent resistance, from the influence of Thoreau and Gandhi through the details of his participation in the Civil Rights Movement.

Lots of years after his epochal Harpers Ferry raid to free the slaves, John Brown is still one of the most controversial figures in American history. In 1970, Stephen B. Oates wrote what has come to be recognized as the definitive biography of Brown, a balanced assessment that captures the man in all his complexity.

When the Civil War broke out, Clara Barton wanted more than anything to be a Union soldier, an impossible dream for a thirty-nine-year-old woman, who stood a slender five feet tall. Determined to serve, she became a veritable soldier, a nurse, and a one-woman relief agency operating in the heart of the conflict. Now, award-winning author Stephen B. Oates, drawing on archival materials not used by her previous biographers, has written the first complete account of Clara Barton's active engagement in the Civil War. By the summer of 1862, with no institutional affiliation or official government appointment, but impelled by a sense of duty and a need to heal, she made her way to the front lines and the heat of battle. Oates tells the dramatic story of this woman who gave the world a new definition of courage, supplying medical relief to the wounded at some of the most famous battles of the war - including Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Battery Wagner, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg. Under fire with only her will as a shield, she worked while ankle deep in gore, in hellish makeshift battlefield hospitals - a bullet-riddled farmhouse, a crumbling mansion, a windblown tent. Committed to healing soldiers' spirits as well as their bodies, she served not only as nurse and relief worker, but as surrogate mother, sister, wife, or sweetheart to thousands of sick, wounded, and dying men. . Her contribution to the Union was incalculable and unique. It also became the defining event in Barton's life, giving her the opportunity as a woman to reach out for a new role and to define a new profession. Nursing, regarded as a menial service before the war, became a trained, paid occupation after the conflict. Although Barton went on to become the founder and first president of the Red Cross, the accomplishment for which she is best known, A Woman of Valor convinces us that her experience on the killing fields of the Civil War was her most extraordinary achievement.

Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure in American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. This superb biography looks back across more than one hundred and twenty years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. With his uncanny gift for understanding the human psyche, Larry McMurtry animates the character of this remarkable figure, whose betrayal by white representatives of the U.S. government was a tragic turning point in the history of the West. A mythic figure puzzled over by generations of historians, Crazy Horse emerges from McMurtry's sensitive portrait as the poignant hero of a long-since-vanished epoch. Marking the debut of the new Penguin Lives series, McMurtry's Crazy Horse is a masterly exemplar of biography in the short form, illuminating both the man and the age with the eloquent economy that will introduce to a new generation of readers this once-popular genre. - Jacket flap.