Charismatic, yet often detached, Sherman is idolized by his men and the freed slaves who follow behind in hope of a better future. The character of General Sherman is an unstable strategic genius who longs for a sense of romance in the war he wages and chafes under the implications of a post-war bureaucracy. Instead, Doctorow retells Civil War history according to the individual lives of a large and diverse cast of characters-white and black, rich and poor, Union and Confederate-whose lives are caught up in the violence and trauma of the war. While the novel revolves around the decisions of General Sherman, the story has no specific main character. As a result of Sherman's order to live off the land, his soldiers sow chaos as they pillage homes, steal cattle, burn crops, and attract a nearly unmanageable population of freed slaves and refugees who have nowhere else to go. Central to the novel is the character of General William Tecumseh Sherman as he marches his 60,000 troops through the heart of the South, from Atlanta to Savannah, carving a 96 km (60-mile)-wide scar of destruction in their wake. Doctorow, The March is a historical fiction novel set in late 1864 and early 1865 near the conclusion of the American Civil War. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2006) and the National Book Critics Circle Award/Fiction (2005). The March: A Novel is a 2005 historical fiction novel by E.

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