The Campfire boys is a novel about camp entertainers in the American Civil War—the “USO for the Blue and Gray.” But it is also much, much more. It follows three brothers who are very good entertainers and very bad soldiers through some of the bloodiest days of the War—from the Peninsula Campaign to Gettysburg. It also gets deep inside soldier life and why laughter and pleasure may help keep soldiers alive.

Called “a splendid novel” and “enchanting read” by Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Campfire Boys reinforces the point of Williams’s earlier novel A Distant Flame that there were Unionist sympathies in the South throughout the war, even if they were expressed subtly. Part comic novel and part a tragic epic of the South’s terrible support for slavery, this new novel sheds light on something rarely written about in history or fiction: the role of entertainment in getting men through war. Hardcover: 401 pages Publisher: Mercer University Press