The March

The March: A Novel is a historical novel by the American writer E. L. Doctorow, published in 2005. Its title refers to Sherman's march to the sea during the American Civil War, and it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The book is set in late 1864 and early 1865, near the end of the war. Sherman takes his sixty thousand troops through the heart of the South, from Atlanta to Savannah, and the army leaves a scar of destruction roughly sixty miles wide behind it.

Because he has ordered his men to live off the land, they pillage homes, take cattle and burn crops, and they attract a population of freed slaves and white refugees who have nowhere else to go and who cannot easily be managed. The novel follows the lives of a large and varied cast of characters, white and black, rich and poor, on both sides of the war.

Sherman himself is one of them, presented as a strategist of unstable gifts who longs for the war to have some romance in it. The book was adapted for television in 2012.