Brookhaven—A Civil War Historical Romance
Brookhaven has arrived! It’s a historical romance set in the American Civil War period. A beautiful and intriguing story, by Glynn Young, it pulls you in and doesn’t let you go.
About Brookhaven
In 1915, young reporter Elizabeth Putnam of the New York World is assigned a story on the Gray Wisp. New information has come to light about this Confederate spy in the Civil War, a figure of legend, myth, and wildly competing claims.
What no one knows is the man’s identity.
The reporter follows leads which eventually bring her to the small Mississippi town of Brookhaven. The Wisp agrees to tell his story, a tale of North and South, loss in wartime, narrow escapes from death in battles, family survival, the poetry of Longfellow, and love. And Elizabeth soon finds her own story has forever become part of the Gray Wisp’s.
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About the Author
Glynn Young is the author of Poetry at Work and The Dancing Priest series. He is a long-time editor at Tweetspeak Poetry and a retired speech writer who spent much of his professional life at a Fortune 500 company. Brookhaven was inspired by his own family stories of an ancestor—a teen who walked the many miles home after his long, hard days in the Civil War, only to discover that his family was no longer there.
Author’s Note
We thought you might enjoy hearing the Author’s Note from Glynn, which gives you a little backstory—and, of course, some of the author’s thanks…
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When I was seven years old, my mother took me to see the movie The Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne and William Holden. It’s the story of a Union cavalry troop of almost 2,000 soldiers who slice their way across Confederate territory. Little did I know that it was based on a true story, called Grierson’s Raid, and that the raid had been experienced by my ancestors in 1863, when they lived in the Brookhaven, Mississippi area.
Brookhaven began as a family story about my great-grandfather, handed down by my grandfather to my father to me. The story was accompanied by the family bible, passed down in the same way.
The story was that my great-grandfather Samuel had been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d been too young to serve as a soldier. When the war ended, he was stranded somewhere in the eastern United States, with Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia or William Johnston’s army in North Carolina.
He made his way home to Brookhaven, Mississippi, mostly on foot, to discover that the family had left for Texas to escape federal occupation, so he continued his journey until he found them.
It was a great story, but it turned out to be mostly invented. An example: my great-grandfather had been a messenger boy, but not in the army. Messenger boys were the young teens who brought telegrams to families telling them of their relative’s death in battle. They were not involved in military battles.
But the larger story was what my family believed and went to their graves believing. (My grandmother was still fighting the Civil War, or what she called the War of Northern Aggression, when she died in 1984.) The real story wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as the invented one, and it was the invented one that I imagined for Brookhaven. That invented story, however, is based on years of research, study, and reading. The characters are all fictitious, but what they experience in the story really happened to people during and after the war.
Books don’t appear by themselves, and L.L. Barkat and Sara Barkat at T. S. Poetry Press were instrumental in making this book happen. My family, including my wife Janet, has put up with a lot while I was writing. I’ve had numerous private conversations with people about battles, historical figures, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction period. A special thanks goes to the writers and editors of the Emerging Civil War website.
I learned something important through this book. Our ancestors may not be the great heroes we thought they were, but living through a cataclysm like the Civil War and its aftermath is a heroic act all by itself.
—Glynn Young, St. Louis, Missouri, November 2024
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L.L. Barkat says
Huge congratulations to you, Glynn. This story was a tender history lesson for me—and a poetic inspiration. You’ve really outdone yourself with this one. 🙂
And I would love to know… what part of the family history that Brookhaven is based on has any truth to it? Were you able to discover? 🙂
Glynn Young says
Members of the family, including my great-grandfather Samuel, experienced Grierson’s Raid in 1863. Unlike the fictional McClures, the Youngs did flee to Texas when Brookhaven came under federal control. And the years immediately after the war were difficult economically; the South’s economy was destroyed and the war had pushed the North even deeper into industrialization. But I’ll write about the story as received in the family and what turned out to be the truth. My father had always told me that “we came from a family of shopkeepers;” that wasn’t anything close to what the census records told me.
Sandra Heska King says
I’m so excited to have this book in my hands. I can’t wait to read it.
Also, it makes me wonder how much actual truth is in our family stories. I’ve found some, but maybe one day I’ll do a little more digging. 😉
Congratulations, Glynn!
Glynn says
I’m trying to figure out how the family story as transmitted was so wrong. I remember how serious my father was when he told me the story of his grandfather. As it turned out, another branch of the family had what was much closer to the truth. The suspect is my grandfather, who was known for both his mischievousness and his pranks. Fake news in your own family! (Another mystery is how my grandfather, the youngest of seven and the fourth son, ended up with the family Bible with all the family records.)