Patriotic Gore

Edmund Wilson's 1962 work of literary and historical criticism reads the American Civil War through the lives and writings of nearly 30 Americans. Its 16 chapters range across Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Chesnut, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and many others, with the most space going to John William De Forest. Much of the material first ran in The New Yorker during the 1950s. Wilson's introduction, written amid Cold War crises, criticizes the Cold War and war in general. David W. Blight faulted its indifference to Black writing, and it almost entirely omits African-American writers, including Frederick Douglass. The title comes from a line in Maryland, My Maryland, the state's former song.

Ryan Holiday said its discussions of Southern and Civil War writers helped him put his earlier reading into context, and included it in his best book recommendations of 2012.