Bruce Catton: The Civil War Storyteller Born Here
Near Petoskey, Michigan
Petoskey gave the world one of America's greatest Civil War storytellers. Bruce Catton was born here in eighteen ninety-nine, the same year, by coincidence, that Ernest Hemingway first came north as a baby. Catton was soon raised in the small town of Benzonia, farther south in Michigan, where his father was a Congregationalist minister and school headmaster.
That town shaped his life's work in an unusual way. As a boy, Catton listened to aging Union veterans of the Civil War tell their stories on porches and at reunions. Those old soldiers, he later wrote, gave a color and a tone to the whole idea of life he grew up with.
That boyhood fascination never left him. As an adult he became a journalist and then a historian, writing with a novelist's feel for the men in the ranks. His book A Stillness at Appomattox won both the Pulitzer Prize for history and the National Book Award in nineteen fifty-four.
Later he returned to his own beginnings in a beloved memoir of his Michigan boyhood, Waiting for the Morning Train. The Little Traverse History Museum honors him alongside Hemingway, two very different writers born of the same small northern town.
