The Wolf Pit - Softcover

Youmans, Marly

3.91

45 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156027143 ISBN 13: 9780156027144

Publisher: Harvest Books, 2003

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A powerful, intimate look at the Civil War on the home and battle fronts, The Wolf Pit is Marly Youmans's third and most accomplished novel. In it Robin, a young Confederate soldier and witness to the horrors of war, clings to what gives him strength: family pictures, psalms, and an old legend about a pair of mysterious green children found in a wolf pit. Robin carries these inside the Elmira prison camp, the very embodiment of hell.
Meanwhile, Agate, the mulatto daughter of a hired-out slave, embraces the forbidden teachings of her mistress, Miss Fanny, who teaches her to love books and to write. But the hope Agate has fashioned for her future disappears when her owner, Young Master, learns of her education. Agate comes to understand the meaning of her mother's cautionary tales as she struggles to survive loss and degradation and to pit knowledge and truth against evil.
By turns eloquent and harrowing, The Wolf Pit explores the will to endure in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and the personal tolls exacted during this chaotic period in U.S. history.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Publisher:

"The Wolf Pit" is the winner of the 2001 Shaara Award, presented by the United States Civil War Center.

The United States Civil War Center of Louisiana State University presents the Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction annually to the author of the best novel of the year. Funded by critically acclaimed novelist Jeff Shaara (Gods and Generals), the award is named after his father, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Civil War novel The Killer Angels, basis for the movie Gettysburg.

From the Inside Flap:

"Ms. Youmans is an inspiration to every writer who must compete with himself: I had thought CATHERWOOD unsurpassable, but Ms. Youmans has done it. Her characters are real; they live and move in the stream of Time as if they had passed only yesterday. Her lyricism breaks my heart and fills me with envy and delight. No other writer I know of can bring the past to us so musically, so truly as Marly Youmans."
--Howard Bahr

"There is an atmosphere, a palpable sense of time and place, about THE WOLF PIT which grips the reader fervently. With her extraordinary sense of language, Marly Youmans proves herself an artist of the first order in this Civil War novel characterized by passionate action, poetic intensity, insights, and fierce intelligence. A haunting, memorable novel."
--Lee Smith

"In the persons of two engaging young people, a Virginia soldier and a mulatto slave girl, THE WOLF PIT confronts those twin horrors of American experience, the Civil War and slavery. Through the many dramatic events of this novel, Marly Youmans has shown herself as a writer of skill and daring. She merits comparison only with the best."
--Elizabeth Spencer

"Beautifully crafted and rich in historical detail, THE WOLF PIT is a stunning novel, mesmerizing from beginning to end. Marly Youmans is a wonderful writer."
--Jill McCorkle

"THE WOLF PIT is a fever dream of a book, a lamentation by a mutilated slave girl and a star-crossed Confederate Soldier. Marly Youmans's lyrical touch puts her in the first rank of contemporary American novelists."
--Curtis Wilke, author of the forthcoming DIXIE(Scribner, 2001)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.