Thomas Kirwan

author

Thomas Kirwan

1829–1911

A Canadian-born journalist, Civil War veteran, and prolific New England writer, he turned firsthand experience into vivid history and fiction. His books range from war memoir and regimental history to anti-clerical fiction and an early utopian novel about a cooperative future.

1 Audiobook

Soldiering in North Carolina Being the experiences of a 'typo' in the pines, swamps, fields, sandy roads, towns, cities, and among the fleas, wood-ticks, 'gray-backs,' mosquitoes, blue-tail flies, moccasin snakes, lizards, scorpions, rebels, and other reptiles, pests, and vermin of the 'Old North State.' Embracing an account of the three-years and nine-months Massachusetts regiments in the department, the freedmen, etc., etc., etc.

Soldiering in North Carolina Being the experiences of a 'typo' in the pines, swamps, fields, sandy roads, towns, cities, and among the fleas, wood-ticks, 'gray-backs,' mosquitoes, blue-tail flies, moccasin snakes, lizards, scorpions, rebels, and other reptiles, pests, and vermin of the 'Old North State.' Embracing an account of the three-years and nine-months Massachusetts regiments in the department, the freedmen, etc., etc., etc.

by Thomas Kirwan

About the author

Born on Prince Edward Island in 1829, Thomas Kirwan was educated in Charlottetown before moving to Boston in the late 1840s. He built a long career in journalism there and became known as a seasoned New England reporter and writer.

Kirwan also served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and that experience shaped some of his best-known work. Soldiering in North Carolina draws on his time in the ranks, while Memorial History of the Seventeenth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry helped preserve the story of one of the war's Massachusetts regiments.

He wrote across several genres, which makes his career especially interesting. Alongside history and memoir, he published fiction such as In Fetters: The Man or the Priest and the utopian novel Reciprocity (Social and Economic) in the Thirtieth Century, issued under the pen name William Wonder. He died in 1911, leaving behind a body of work that blends reportage, memory, argument, and imagination.