author
Mary Ann Webster Loughborough
1836–1887
Best known for a vivid firsthand account of the Siege of Vicksburg, this 19th-century writer turned personal hardship into one of the Civil War’s most memorable civilian narratives. She also worked as a magazine publisher in Arkansas, helping shape literary life in the postwar South.
1 Audiobook
My Cave Life in Vicksburg, with Letters of Trial and Travel
by Mary Ann Webster Loughborough
About the author
Born in Phelps, New York, in 1836, Mary Ann Webster Loughborough became known for writing My Cave Life in Vicksburg (1864), a firsthand account of surviving the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg with her young daughter while her husband served with the Confederate military. The book quickly drew attention for its immediate, personal view of wartime life from inside the besieged city.
After the war, she lived in Arkansas and became publisher of the Southern Ladies’ Journal in Little Rock. Sources on her early life differ on some details, but they agree that she built a literary reputation from her writing and publishing work and remained associated above all with her Vicksburg memoir.
She died in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today, her work is still remembered as one of the most noted civilian accounts of the Civil War, especially for readers interested in how women and families experienced the conflict day by day.