author
William Franklin Gore Shanks
1837–1905
A Civil War-era journalist with a reporter’s eye for character, he wrote vivid sketches of leading Union generals drawn from firsthand experience. His work blends biography, war reporting, and personal observation in a way that still feels immediate.
1 Audiobook
Personal Recollections of Distinguished Generals
by William Franklin Gore Shanks
About the author
Born in Shelbyville, Kentucky, on April 20, 1837, William Franklin Gore Shanks was an American journalist and author. Reference sources describe him as a war correspondent for the New York Herald during the American Civil War, and later as an editorial writer there.
He went on to hold senior newspaper and magazine roles, including work as managing editor of Harper’s Weekly and later as city editor of the New York World. He is best remembered as the author of Personal Recollections of Distinguished Generals (1866), a book that draws on his own observations of prominent Civil War commanders and aims to show them as people as well as public figures.
Shanks died in 1905. While detailed biographical information about his private life is not easy to confirm from widely available sources, the record that survives shows a writer closely connected to the journalism and military history of his time.