ABSTRACT
When the Civil War began, Americans soon realized that it would not only transform the political landscape forever, but also the ways in which they produced and consumed literature. From the very start of the hostilities, writers in the North and South commented on how the war was disrupting, fostering, or otherwise changing literature, reading habits, and book production. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote in his journal in May 1861: “Nothing alive but the military. Bookselling dead.” Having recently visited the Old Corner bookstore of Ticknor and Fields in Boston and seen the lack of business there firsthand, he concluded: “So much for war and books” (Fahs 20). Other writers found not only that popular demand for any literature besides war-related news was down, but that they themselves were so engaged in the events of the war that they were unable to continue writing as before. Southern author William Gilmore Simms complained in a letter to a friend that “nobody reads nowadays, and no one prints. My desks are already filled with MS.S. Why add to the number—the mass—when I so frequently feel like giving these to the flames?” (393–94). Simms, who nevertheless composed numerous poems on war-related themes and published them in southern periodicals throughout the war, worried that he would not be able to write anything more substantial, and that there would not be any possibility of publishing a book even if he did.
