Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heoines in American literature.
Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the “War for Southern Independence”, Lucy became a “veteran of the veteran” with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator’s daily battles in the Home—complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.
“Bawdy, raucous, comic… The story of the South in all its tragic and self-perceived glory.”
—The Boston Globe
“An old-fashioned book-lovers novel.” —Chicago Tribune
“A big book in every way, one hell of an American novel.” —San Francisco Chronicle