author
Beckwith West
A Civil War diarist whose surviving work reads with the immediacy of lived experience, he left behind a compact but vivid account of captivity in 1862. His writing offers a firsthand look at prison life, military routine, and the personal strain of war.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Beckwith West is known for Experience of a Confederate States Prisoner, a Civil War narrative first published in Richmond in 1862. Library of Congress and Internet Archive records describe it as an ephemeris, or diary, kept by an officer of the Confederate States Army, and note that it covers the period from May to August 1, 1862.
Reliable biographical details about West himself are scarce in the sources I could confirm. What can be said with confidence is that his surviving book stands as a firsthand wartime document, written close to the events it describes and valued today as a personal narrative of imprisonment during the American Civil War.
Because so little firmly sourced information about his life is readily available, West is best introduced through the work itself: brief, direct, and historically revealing. Readers interested in Civil War memoirs may find his account especially compelling for its diary-like immediacy and its close view of captivity from a Confederate officer's perspective.