“A Diary From Dixie” is Mary Boykin Chesnut’s celebrated firsthand account of life in the Confederate South during the Civil War years of 1861-1865. Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate Senator and Brigadier General described the life of an upper-class planter society confronting the encroaching realities of the end of slavery and her peers’ way of life. Full of important personages and eminently readable, the Diary was quoted extensively in Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” documentary and has been described as the most important work by a Confederate author.
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Mary Boykin Chesnut (1823–1886), was a South Carolina author best known for her Civil War diary, “A Diary From Dixie”. Describing the war from within the upper-class circles of Southern planter society she mostly traveled in, she included all classes of Southern life in her writings. Married to a pro-slavery lawyer who served as a United States senator and Confederate officer, Mary secretly held anti-slavery views. Though Chesnut edited her extensive diary from 1881–1884 to focus on the Civil War years, it was not published until 19 years after her death in 1905. Literary critics have praised Chesnut’s diary as a masterpiece of the genre and the most important work by a Confederate author.