The Wolf Pit - Hardcover

Youmans, Marly

3.91

45 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374291950 ISBN 13: 9780374291952

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

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A powerful yet intimate novel of the Civil War on the home and battle fronts

Winner of the 2001 Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction

The Wolf Pit offers a gripping portrait of two young Virginians forever altered by violence and civil war. Robin, a young Confederate soldier, battles from a valley of blood to a burning wilderness to labyrinthine trenches. He clings-despite the slaughter of friends and illusions-to what gives him strength, to the beautiful and the uncanny: family pictures, Psalms, and an old tale about a pair of mysterious green children found in a wolf pit. Robin carries these inside the very palisades of hell, the Elmira prison camp.
Agate, the daughter of a hired-out slave, embraces the forbidden teachings of her mistress, Miss Fanny. But the images she has fashioned for herself shatter when she encounters and deeply offends her owner, Young Master. At the Williams Home Place, Agate learns the meaning of her mother's cautionary tales as she struggles to survive loss and degradation and to pit knowledge and truth against evil.

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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)

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