Pittsburg Landing

by Robert Burns Clark

On April 6 and 7, 1862, twenty-three thousand men were killed or maimed at an obscure post on the Tennessee River.  Pittsburg Landing tells the story of two of those men: their bravery, their loves and their loss.

 One, a forty-two-year-old West Point graduate, reluctantly volunteers.  He goes to Indiana to train his troops and is reacquainted with the daughter of an old friend.  She is now twenty-two, a skilled surgical assistant, beautiful and determined.  Still suffering from the loss of his wife and child, the officer finds himself falling in love. The young woman unashamedly pursues the romance, and they marry.  Ten days later, he is called to the front.  Believing that she will never see her husband again, she joins a surgical unit and arrives to find him on the field, critically wounded.

 The other man, a native of Alabama, is a veteran of the Mexican War, during which, in one night, he single-handedly killed thirty-four men.  He has sworn to never take another life.  When his son runs away to join the fighting, he rushes to save him, vowing to destroy everything that gets in his way, no matter the color of the uniform. 

 The characters all meet at a terrible place called Pittsburg Landing.  The battle is also known as the Battle of Shiloh. 

 Clark worked on Pittsburg Landing for over ten years.  The research alone took years to complete.  The book is a seamless melding of true characters and events from the Civil War era.  It is an attempt to rip away the heroic mythology, though there was great heroism, from the blood-letting of that era.  Its purpose is to show how real children, husbands, wives and lovers were affected by those events in the hope that no other American will be fed into the jaws of war without serious and sober deliberation.

Pittsburg Landing was recently recognized as a 2012 Honorable Mention Winner for General Fiction by the prestious San Francisco Book Festival.