Growing up in 1850s Alabama, Cooper Waterman longed to become a man of letters - a lofty dream for a handicapped lad who was poor and fatherless, and left school at 13 to become a shoeshine boy. But with his imagination, a notebook and a stub of a pencil, he rose to become a newspaper reporter, eventually going off to serve as a Civil War correspondent. Covering an epic American struggle, Cooper survives the siege of Vicksburg and rides through bloody cavalry battles with the formidable General Nathan Bedford Forrest, taking time along the way to write letters to home for hundreds of wounded or illiterate soldiers. Compelling, ringing with authenticity and told through the eyes of a southern journalist, The Letter Writer is a Civil War story remarkably different than any you may have ever read.