“The War on Words delivers an impressively wide-ranging reinterpretation, at once rigorously astringent and perceptively sympathetic, of how canonical American writers coped with the formidable challenges not to engage in public talk about slavery and racism. Though some of Gilmore’s assessments are bound to provoke controversy, no serious reader of this book—which should indeed be required reading for all serious Americanists—will fail to come away informed and invigorated by Gilmore’s understanding of the de facto constraints on expression that confront even our ‘free’ society, both then and now.”

“The War on Words is a brave and brilliant book that explores the fact of censorship, particularly as it operated in matters of slavery and race, in nineteenth-century American literature and politics. While positioning the Civil War as the moment when ‘the nature of utterance’ shifted from the comic to the tragic, from prophecy to indirection, from abolitionists to the Klan, Gilmore nevertheless attends to the consistency, across the century, with which words are championed, attacked, feared, and erased. With remarkable range and acuity, Gilmore convincingly demonstrates that what could not be said is as significant an impetus for the production and understanding of American literature as what could.”

“Starting from the silences and evasions about race in the Declaration and Constitution, Michael T. Gilmore traces the fate of free speech as he conducts a compelling re-envisioning of the whole span of nineteenth-century American political culture and literature—from Emerson, Thoreau, and Lincoln to Stephen Crane, Twain, and Thomas Dixon. Using Bartleby’s mid-century silence as a brilliant hinge to its narrative, The War on Words moves from heroic antebellum proponents of words as deeds to the ‘tragedy of linguistic impotence’ that marked the betrayal of African-Americans as Reconstruction unraveled and realism reflected the repudiation of racial equality. In Gilmore’s expert hands nearly a score of canonical figures are accorded fresh and persuasive readings; The War on Words is an exciting book.”

“Gilmore's interpretations explain the texts' plot twists and figurative language in original ways, and with illuminating reference to historical contexts.”