Pulitzer Prize Biography Winner
R. E. Lee
by Douglas S. Freeman
Summary
Freeman's four volume life of Robert E. Lee follows the Confederate general from his Virginia youth through the campaigns of the Civil War and his postwar years as a college president. The work is exhaustively researched, using a method Freeman called fog of war that restricts the reader to what Lee himself knew at each moment. It became the standard military biography of its subject for decades.
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Historical Context & Significance
Freeman spent roughly twenty years on the four volume work and won a second Pulitzer posthumously in 1958 for his biography of George Washington.