In The Review Queue: Gettysburg, The Living and the Dead

Gettysburg: TheLiving and the Dead

By Kent Gramm

Photographs by Chris Heisey

In Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead, writer Kent Gramm and photographer Chris Heisey tell the famous battle’s story through the eyes of those who lived and died there. Unlike histories that simply recount the three furious days in July 1863, this book transports readers onto the battlefield and into the event’s historical echoes, making for a delightful, immersive experience.

Creative nonfiction, fiction, dramatic dialogue, and poetry combine with full-color photographs to convey the essential reality of the famous battlefield as a place both terrible and beautiful. The living and the dead contained here include Confederates and Yankees, soldiers and civilians, male and female, young and old. Visitors to the battlefield after 1863, both well known and obscure, provide the voices of the living. They include a female admiral in the U.S. Navy and a man from rural Virginia who visits the battlefield as a way of working through the death of his son in Iraq. The ghostly voices of the dead include actual participants in the battle, like a fiery colonel and a girl in Confederate uniform, as well as their representatives, such as a grieving widow who has come to seek her husband. 

Utilizing light as a central motif and fourscore and seven voices to evoke how Gettysburg continues to draw visitors and resound throughout history, alternately wounding and stitching the lives it touches, Gramm’s words and Heisey’s photographs meld for a historical experience unlike any other. Gettysburg: The Living and the Dead offers a panoramic view wherein the battle and battlefield of Gettysburg are seen through the eyes of those who lived through it and died on it as well as those who have sought meaning at the site ever since.

About the Authors

Kent Gramm is an adjunct professor of English at Gettysburg College. His prior works include November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg, Gettysburg: A Meditation on War and Values, Somebody’s Darling: Essays on the Civil War, and two poetry collections. He edited Battle: The Nature and Consequences of Civil War Combat. His play Lincoln Lives was performed in Baton Rouge as part of Louisiana’s Lincoln Bicentennial Inauguration.

Chris Heisey has won awards for his photography and has published popular Civil War calendars. He contributed photographs to In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee: The Wilderness through Cold Harbor with text by Gordon Rhea and to Gettysburg: This Hallowed Ground with text by Kent Gramm.

ISBN 978-0809337330, Southern Illinois University Press, © 2019, Hardcover, 240 pages, Photographs, $34.50.  To purchase this book click HERE.