Books: Connecticut Yankee

A VOLUNTEER'S ADVENTURES (237 pp.) —John William De Forest—Edited by James H. Croushore—Yale ($3).

The great national experience of the 19th Century was the Civil War, yet it is an odd fact that no major U.S. novelist fought in the war. U.S. literature is the poorer for it. Hawthorne was in his late fifties when the war began, in his grave before it ended. Stephen Crane, who wrote the great Civil War novel ( The Red Badge of Courage) without ever seeing a battle, was born in 1871. Howells spent the war years as U.S....