The March (novel)

• 1. Introduction

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  The March is a 2005 historical fiction novel by E. L. Doctorow, and it begins where many Civil War stories end: not at a battlefield, but in the wreckage left behind. General William Tecumseh Sherman has already taken Atlanta. Now his army of 60,000 soldiers moves through the heart of the South, cutting a 96-kilometer-wide scar of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. Behind them, something unexpected: a growing, nearly unmanageable mass of freed slaves and refugees, following the army because they have nowhere else to go.

  Doctorow refuses to tell this story from any single vantage point. There is no main character. Instead, the novel follows a large, diverse cast whose lives are overturned by the march: a young woman of mixed race uncertain about her future, a German-trained surgeon who carries his hacksaw everywhere, two Confederate soldiers playing comic and tragic roles in equal measure, and a displaced daughter of a Southern judge. Who are these people, and what does the war make of them? Those are the questions the novel holds open until the very end.

• 2. Sherman at the Center

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  General Sherman is described in the novel as an unstable strategic genius, and Doctorow does not soften that contradiction. Sherman longs for romance in the war he is waging. He chafes at the prospect of postwar bureaucracy even as he is still winning the war itself. His men idolize him; the freed slaves who trail behind his army look to him as a figure of hope.

  Yet Sherman's order to live off the land is what unleashes the chaos the novel catalogs. His soldiers pillage homes, steal cattle, and burn crops. The army that carries liberation for enslaved people simultaneously spreads terror across the civilian landscape. Doctorow places Sherman at the novel's center without making him its hero. He is charismatic and often detached, a man whose decisions ripple outward through dozens of lives he will never know.

  The march itself runs from late 1864 into early 1865, near the conclusion of the Civil War. That compressed timeline gives the novel its urgency: these characters are caught in history's final convulsions, and everyone can feel the approaching end.

• 3. A Cast Without a Protagonist

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  Pearl is the daughter of a black enslaved woman named Nancy Wilkins and her white master, which places her in an uncertain position as the march unfolds. She is young, described as attractive, and now drawing attention from Union soldiers. The choice before her is stark: follow the counsel of other emancipated slaves, or pursue what she hopes the war's end might make possible for someone like her.

  Colonel Wrede Sartorius brings a different kind of cold precision to the novel. Trained in Germany, he experiments with new surgical techniques on his patients and seems insulated from the horror around him by the constant presence of his surgical hacksaw. He forms a relationship with Emily Thompson, a judge's daughter from Milledgeville, Georgia, which was then the state capital of Georgia. Emily becomes both his surgical assistant and his lover, though Sartorius is described as cold and passionless.

  And then there are Arly and Will, two Confederate soldiers Doctorow uses in the tradition of the Shakespearean fool. Their episodes veer into dark comedy: defecting to the Union army, impersonating others, and robbing a church to fund a visit to a brothel. Through their chaos, the novel finds room for both comic relief and the kind of pointed, unexpected wisdom that fools in Shakespeare typically carry.

• 4. A War Without a Clean End

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  The novel closes on the 14th of April 1865, when Lincoln is assassinated shortly after Lee's surrender. The timing is devastating. The freed slaves and soldiers had been moving toward cautious optimism, and the assassination tears through that fragile feeling. Doctorow does not end on triumph.

  The final image is concrete and quiet: the faint smell of gunpowder fading through a forest, and a fallen soldier's boot and shredded uniform lying in the dirt. No character steps forward to pronounce meaning. The land and the people both carry scars, and no one quite knows what to do next. That unresolved quality is deliberate. Doctorow's characters express guarded hope, but the physical and psychological damage of the war does not dissolve with the Confederate surrender.

  The novel's refusal to resolve cleanly connects to its structure. By distributing the story across so many lives, Doctorow makes it impossible for any single redemption arc to stand in for the whole. Emily Thompson's fate, Pearl's choices, even Sherman's restlessness all remain open in ways that mirror the actual uncertainty of 1865.

• 5. Awards and Recognition

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  The March won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the same year it was published. The following year it took the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2006, an award Doctorow had previously won in 1990 for Billy Bathgate. It was a finalist for both the 2005 National Book Award and the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

  The novel also won the 2006 Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction, a prize specifically honoring work in that historical genre. In early 2012, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago premiered a stage adaptation, extending the novel's life into a different medium and a different kind of audience encounter.