Convention Book of the Day: the past lingers longer than most admit.

Henry Bemis has been celebrating America’s quadrennial festivals of democracy, the political conventions, with a series of articles, author profiles, and books by people involved in politics.

Today’s book is the debut novel of a North Carolina writer, Allen Gurganus:

Gurganus, Allan, Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All (Alfred A. Knopf, 1st ed. 1989). Child bride of an ancient Civil War soldier (she married when she was 15 and he was 50), Lucy Marsden is now herself 99, and seized of the notion to tell her life’s story.

Gurganus, then a struggling writer in New York, got the idea for the book in 1981, after reading an article about how there were still over a dozen Civil War Widows living in southern states’ Confederate retirement homes. Published in 1989, Oldest Confederate Widow spent eight months on The New York Times’ best-seller list, was a Book of the Month Club Main Selection and a CBS television movie that won four Emmys, and has sold over four million copies. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, very good condition. HBB price: $79.95 obo.

Gurganus, now 69, attended Sarah Lawrence College, mostly because the school gave him credit for the 1200 books he read while serving as a code translator on a Navy aircraft carrier for three years. He got his start as a protege of the writer John Cheever, who sold a Gurganus story to The New Yorker without telling him in 1974. “Minor Heroism” was the first New Yorker story with a gay character. It was a breakthrough of sorts, since founding editor Harold Ross instructed his staff that “homosexuals do not exist.”

After a series of well-received short story collections and teaching posts at Stanford, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Duke, Gurganus returned to North Carolina in the ‘90s to found the political action group Writers Against Jesse Helms.

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