Dec 26, 2009

Across Five Aprils | Literary Qualities

Across Five Aprils is a finely wrought piece of prose fiction. The plot parallels the course of the Civil War, beginning in April 1861, when Fort Sumter is attacked, and reaching to the "saddest and most cruel April of the five," when Lincoln is assassinated in 1865. Set on the Creighton farm and its close environs in southern Illinois, the action mostly consists of Jethro's moral and emotional development, leaving the distant battles to be described through the letters of absent characters.

Although the story is told in the third person, Hunt reveals all the action...