The First World War led to the largest boom in published American war books since the Civil War. War memoirs were popular with both publishers and readers alike. Hundreds of returning doughboys took to their pens and published accounts of fighting in France. Joining them were books by nurses and canteen workers who also told stories of their experiences at the front supporting the Allied war effort. This chapter examines war memoirs published both during and after the war. It considers trends in martial publishing and argues that the wealth of war-relating writing created a cultural footprint of American war books that rested somewhat uneasily as feelings about the First World War changed in the 1920s. Moreover, the variety of war memoirs released further complicates notions of a uniform American experience in print. Rather, there is tension between books celebrating American and Allied victory with those that emphasize the hard-fought realities of combat on the western front.

Many writers saw the US Civil War as an apocalypse, but they construed that apocalypticism in different ways. I approach the apocalyptic archive of Civil War literature by tracking the aesthetic techniques authors employed to represent the war’s cataclysmic dimensions and the political, religious, and historical meanings they assigned to the nation’s convulsion. My readings show how reflecting on the Civil War as an apocalypse occasioned formal innovations that pushed nineteenth-century writing in unexpected directions and how apocalyptic representations of the conflict went hand in hand with millenarian appraisals of the nation’s, and sometimes the hemisphere’s, future. Ultimately, I argue that such apocalyptic and millennial thought is inextricable from the history of race relations in America, for any appraisal of wartime upheaval is also necessarily an overt or tacit reflection on the history and legacy of slavery. I make this argument by considering writing by William Wells Brown, Matthias Carvalho, John De Forest, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Ruban His Sacred Nest, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Henry Timrod, and Walt Whitman.