The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers, Series 2

In the cauldron of the American Civil War, Orpheus C. Kerr, war correspondent extraordinary, faces an impossible task: describe a battle in full without revealing anything that might incense the press censor. No locality, no troop numbers, no commanding officers, no result. What emerges is a magnificently absurd chronicle where Kerr's desperate attempts to satisfy both military censorship and public hunger for news spiral into ever more convoluted comic scenarios. He navigates the minefield of wartime journalism while the Mackerel Brigade a regiment of spectacularly incompetent bravado led by a General of magnificent self-importance and the unflappable Captain Villiam Brown charge into comic disaster after comic disaster. Newell's satirical voice is impeccable: mock-earnest, elaborately roundabout, addressing the reader as "my boy" while laying bare the absurdities of war, the pretensions of military glory, and the peculiar pressures of reporting from the front. This is American humor at its most inventive: sharp, irreverent, and surprisingly modern in its absurdist sensibility.