The legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction remain a central part of American life a century and a half later. Drawing together leading scholars in literary studies and history, this volume offers accessible treatments of major authors and genres of this period, including Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Chesnutt, as well as fiction, poetry, drama, and life-writing. Although focused on literature, this Companion also canvases battlefields, homefronts, and hospitals, and discusses a range of topics, including constitutional reform and presidential impeachment; emancipation and Africa; material culture and monuments; education, civil rights, and reenactment. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction speaks powerfully to literature's ability to help readers come to terms with a violent, oppressive history while also imagining a different future. ‘… offers important interventions regarding how to read, study, and teach the literature and culture of the Civil War and Reconstruction given current disagreements about ‘periodization and historiography’.’ Trisha M. Brady, Journal of Southern History This is an accessible, path-breaking, and carefully-curated Companion written by leading scholars of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Kathleen Diffley is an associate professor of English at the University of Iowa and director of the Civil War Caucus. She is the author of Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (1992; 2020) and The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 (2021). Coleman Hutchison is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (2012), the co-author of Writing About American Literature: A Guide for Students (2014), and the editor of A History of American Civil War Literature (2015).