The Deserter, and Other Stories

Four stories of two wars four centuries apart. The Deserter and A Day in the Wilderness belong to the American Civil War and the Northern farms it reached — a deserter found hiding in a barn, a bounty-jumper, a rescue in the Wilderness fighting; How Dickon Came by His Name and Where Avon into Severn Flows go back to fifteenth-century England and the Wars of the Roses. Frederic grew up in upstate New York during the war, and he wrote the deserter's story without deciding for the reader whether the man was a coward. Forty-seven plates by painters including Edvard Munch and George Catlin carry the scenes of arrest, battle and rescue that these stories turn on.