Scholarship on Uterature of the American Civ? War has tradi tionaUy begun in the same place?with Walt Whitman. In Specimen Days, Whitman claimed that "the real war w?l never get in the books" and this pronouncement has seemed prophetic to the many critics who have sub sequently deplored the absence of "good" writing about the war. Ed mund W?son, in his monumental study Patriotic Gore, complains that the American Civ? War can be said to have produced "a remarkable Utera ture" only if one is wilHng to include "speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journaUstic reports." Locating his own experience within the context of two world wars and the tensions of an uneasy nuclear peace, W?son is openly dismissive of most Uterature written during times of conflict: "The unanimity of men at war is Uke that of a school of fish, which wiU swerve, simultaneously and apparently without leadership, when the shadow of an enemy appears." Even wh?e he tries to chaUenge W?son's contention by demonstrating the extent to which the war "touched" and "engaged" writers of the time, Daniel Aaron nonetheless regretfuUy agrees in The Unwritten War that the Civ? War produced a "paucity of 'epics' and 'masterpieces.' " Recently, however, Uterary scholars and historians have begun to inter rogate the critical priorities Whitman's assertion has been used to justify. What is "the real war," they have asked, and why is it not representable? Is