Spotlight on Glen Craney, author of The Cotillion Brigade (A Novel of the Civil War and the Most Famous Female Militia in American History)

 

Georgia burns.
Sherman’s Yankees are closing in.
Will the women of LaGrange run or fight?
 
Based on the true story of the celebrated Nancy Hart Rifles, The Cotillion Brigade is an epic novel of the Civil War’s ravages on family and love, the resilient bonds of sisterhood in devastation, and the miracle of reconciliation between bitter enemies.
 
“Gone With The Wind meets A League Of Their Own.”
-- John Jeter, The Plunder Room
 
1856. Sixteen-year-old Nannie Colquitt Hill makes her debut in the antebellum society of the Chattahoochee River plantations. A thousand miles north, a Wisconsin farm boy, Hugh LaGrange, joins an Abolitionist crusade to ban slavery in Bleeding Kansas.
 
Five years later, secession and war against the homefront hurl them toward a confrontation unrivaled in American history.

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 Glen Craney
Some Facts
(Stuff you may or may not know!)

When I was a boy, a great-uncle took me to the American Civil War battlefield of Perryville, Kentucky, where his father served as a Union captain. It was a rare treat to talk to someone with such a close connection to the war. Years later, after his death, I discovered his father had a brother who fought at Perryville on the Confederate side, and they searched for each other after the battle. I’m not sure why my great-uncle never mentioned him. Hard feelings over the war, maybe?

 

Glen Craney and Uncle at Perryville 
(personal photo)

 As the only boy in my high-school typing class, I won the contest for tapping out the most words per minute. I now have two graduate degrees, but typing remains the most valuable skill I’ve ever learned.

A couple of years ago, I traced the Civil War route my great-great grandfather took in General Grant’s army. At the Louisiana battlefield of Mansfield, where he was captured, there was only one other visitor that afternoon, a man from Texas. His great-great-grandfather, fighting for the Confederacy, was killed on that same ground. We were stunned to discover that our ancestors had served in regiments that faced off against each other during the battle. Could my ancestor have fired the fatal shot?

 

Battlefield of Mansfield

 (taken by Glen Craney)

 I grew up on a turkey farm. There's an old saying: Only one creature on Earth is dumber than a turkey—the guy who raises them.

 

Turkey Farm

 (personal photo)

Before I turned ten, I single-handedly won a hundred Civil War battles and repulsed Santa Anna at the Alamo, all with one weapon: This Parris Kadet toy cap musket.

Parris Kadet Toy Civil War musket

 (personal photo)

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Buy Links

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Glen Craney

A graduate of Indiana University School of Law and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Glen Craney practiced trial law before joining the Washington, D.C. press corps to write about national politics and the Iran-contra trial for Congressional Quarterly magazine. In 1996, the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences awarded him the Nicholl Fellowship prize for best new screenwriting. His debut historical novel, The Fire and the Light, was named Best New Fiction by the National Indie Excellence Awards. He is a three-time Finalist/Honorable Mention winner of Foreword Magazine’s Book-of-the-Year and a Chaucer Award winner for Historical Fiction. His books have taken readers to Occitania during the Albigensian Crusade, the Scotland of Robert Bruce, Portugal during the Age of Discovery, the trenches of France during World War I, the battlefields of the Civil War, and the American Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. He lives in Malibu, California.

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